Emergent leadership in teams is known as a special type of informal leadership that has unique benefits. Given that this form of leadership can be developed only organically from within the team, an informal leader may not emerge and the associated advantages can be missed. We explored the possibility of leveraging robotic social behavior to facilitate the emergence of leadership in a team. We evaluated whether a robot displaying explicit peer liking towards a specific team member would encourage that team member to take the lead. Two (stranger) participants were asked to engage in a search task together with a robotic dog who either presented peer-liking behavior toward one or both of them during the opening encounter. Our findings suggest that the robot's peer liking led the “Liked” participant to report higher sense of leadership and higher sense of responsibility over the task. Behavioral measures also indicated that the “Liked” participant managed the team's performance. We suggest that integrating a robot into human teams presents an opportunity to facilitate unique dynamics that would not develop when imposing a structure on the team from the outside.

It is well established that people perceive robots as social entities, even when they are not designed for social interaction. We evaluated whether the social interpretation of robotic gestures should also be considered when turning off a robot. In the experiment, participants engaged in a brief preliminary neutral interaction while a robotic arm showed interest in their actions. At the end of the task, participants were asked to turn off the robotic arm under two conditions: (1) a Non-designed condition, where all of the robot’s engines were immediately and simultaneously turned off, as robots typically shut down; (2) a Designed condition, where the robot’s engines gradually folded inward in a motion resembling "falling asleep." Our findings revealed that all participants anthropomorphized the robot’s movement when it was turned off. In the Non-designed condition, most participants interpreted the robot’s turn-off movement negatively as if the robot had "died." In the Designed condition, most of the participants interpreted it more neutrally, stating that the robot: "went to sleep." The robot’s turn-off movement also impacted its perception, leading to higher likeability, perceived intelligence, and animacy in the Designed condition. We conclude that the impact of common edge interactions, such as turning off a robot, should be carefully designed while considering people’s automatic tendency to perceive robots as social entities.

Opening encounters are a fundamental component of every interaction. Psychology research highlights the valence of opening encounters as one of the main factors shaping the interaction that follows. We evaluated whether opening encounters would have a similarly powerful effect on human-robot interactions. Specifically, we tested how positive and negative opening encounters with a robot would impact the subsequent interaction. Participants interacted with a robot that performed gestures communicating different valences of opening encounters: Positive, Negative, or No opening encounter. To evaluate the impact on the subsequent interaction, we measured participants' willingness to comply with a help request presented by the robot and their perception of the robot. Our results indicated that most participants in the Positive opening encounter condition helped the robot and described a positive overall perception. An opposite pattern emerged in the other two conditions. Almost none of the participants helped the robot, and the perception of the robot was less positive. Our findings suggest that opening encounters with robots should be carefully considered due to their impact on the interaction that follows.

A main challenge in incorporating autonomous vehicles into urban environments concerns communication with pedestrians crossing in front of them. We introduce a robotic object for facilitating natural crossing interactions by leveraging pedestrians’ existing crossing habits. The robot was designed to fit on the vehicle’s dashboard and simulate head gestures to indicate if it is safe to cross. We evaluated the perception of the robot as mediating the AV’s communication and the comprehension of its gestures, in an in-person experiment. Participants were asked to cross the road in front of a vehicle that was presented as having autonomous driving capabilities. The robot was placed on the vehicle’s dashboard in a location where pedestrians habitually look. The results indicated that when asked to cross, participants immediately looked toward the driver’s seat and easily noticed the robot. They consistently categorized the robot’s gestures into ”cross” or ”do-not-cross” categories and reported a strong sense of safety. Our findings suggest that robotic objects are a promising technology for mediating natural pedestrian-AV communication.