This study explores interactive scripted performance with a character robot to create an engaging storytelling experience. By involving human participants as performers alongside the robot, we investigated whether this approach could enhance engagement in the storytelling experience. We developed a character robot system capable of executing predefined phrases and movements to foster immersion, thereby enhancing engagement. We conducted interactive scripted performance events at after-school care facilities. The results indicate that interactive scripted performance encouraged participants to engage in the experience actively. Moreover, the findings suggest that the developed character robot enhanced participants’ story immersion and encouraged physical engagement.

Science Fiction Prototyping (SFP) is a method that uses science fiction to imagine future technologies and foster innovation. It is considered effective for exploring human-robot relationships and envisioning better robot designs. However, robot embodiment influences human perception, which plays a crucial role in interaction. Simply imagining future scenarios with robots through SFP may overlook these aspects. We propose an approach called Experiential Science Fiction Prototyping (ESFP), which adds a phase of experiencing the story to the traditional SFP process. To explore the effects of ESFP, we conducted a workshop with Japanese teenagers under the theme of designing a robot that contributes to a sense of “ibasho”—a Japanese concept referring to a space or relationship where one feels accepted and comfortable. ESFP unfolds in three phases: Storytelling, where participants envision future lives with robots and create stories; Experience, where they bring these stories to life through interaction with a physical robot; and Discussion, where they reflect on the story they created and experienced. The results suggested that, through the experiential phase, participants developed new ideas about interaction with robots and expanded their imagination about future relationships. Experiencing the story helped participants connect more closely with the envisioned robot interactions and inspired new reflections and expectations. This study contributes by proposing the ESFP method, detailing its implementation, and discussing its potential through a case study.

In Japan, home robots have become popular and are widely loved. In particular, Sony’s aibo users have formed a big community, and a society where humans and robots live in harmony is becoming a reality. In order for robots to be more accepted in society, exploratory analysis and explicit description of their bonds are important. However, the scale for measuring relationships with robots has not yet been defined, so a suitable measure was created from the Friendship Function Scale to measure the relationship of friends and the Pet Awareness Scale to measure the attitude toward pets. Using the proposed scale, we investigated the role of home robots, subjective intimacy, and attitudes toward robots among 54 robot owners. The survey found that more than half of them considered robots to be pets or children. In addition, the average value of subjective intimacy was very high to indicate a very high level of attachment to the robot. Furthermore, as a result of factor analysis of the scale items, five factors were extracted: "Comfort," "Irreplaceability," "Trust from the robot," "Trust to the robot," and "Social life." At this time, there was no bias in how users felt about comfort and irreplaceability, but there was a bias in how users felt about trust. Additionally, those with the highest level of subjective intimacy felt significantly more "trusted by the robot" than those with the other level of intimacy, suggesting that recognition of trust from the robot may be an important bond-forming strategy. In the future, we will aim to form further bonds by investigating relationships with robots that play various roles, as well as in regions other than Japan.

In this study, we examined scene selection methods and emotion-based descriptions for a robot’s daily diary. We proposed a scene selection method and an emotion description method that take into account semantic and affective information, and created several types of diaries. Experiments were conducted to examine the change in sentiment values and preference of each diary, and it was found that the robot’s feelings and impressions changed more from date to date when scenes were selected using the affective captions. Furthermore, we found that the robot’s emotion generally improves the preference of the robot’s diary regardless of the scene it describes. However, presenting negative or mixed emotions at once may decrease the preference of the diary or reduce the robot’s robot-likeness, and thus the method of presenting emotions still needs further investigation.

Holding hands can give people a sense of security. In this study, we developed a five-fingered robotic hand that can hold hands with a person and a guidance system that uses the developed hand to hold hands with them. In this system, a robot remembers the location where people have taught it and guides people to that point. We conducted an experiment to evaluate the sense of security in guidance with hand-holding compared with guidance without hand-holding. Participants watched the videos on these two conditions and answered a questionnaire. The results confirmed that holding hands can lead to a sense of security.