Auditory cues facilitate situational awareness by enabling humans to infer what is happening in the nearby environment. Unlike humans, many robots do not continuously produce perceivable state-expressive sounds. In this work, we propose the use of iconic auditory signals that mimic the sounds produced by a robot»s operations. In contrast to artificial sounds (e.g., beeps and whistles), these signals are primarily functional, providing information about the robot»s actions and state. We analyze the effects of two variations of robot sound, tonal and broadband, on auditory localization during a human-robot collaboration task. Results from 24 participants show that both signals significantly improve auditory localization, but the broadband variation is preferred by participants. We then present a computational formulation for auditory signaling and apply it to the problem of auditory localization using a human-subjects data collection with 18 participants to learn optimal signaling policies.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of robot types on emotional communication between a person and a robot. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants were interviewed with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers, and asked how much they felt social presence of robot interviewers and embarrassment toward robot interviewers. Participants felt more social presence to tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Moreover, participants felt more embarrassment when they were interviewed with tele-operated robots than autonomous robots.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the robot types on emotional engagement with robots. Robots are classified into an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot according to the levels of autonomy. On the contrary, robots could be distinguished depending on the levels of human intervention required for controlling a robot. An autonomous robot performs task by itself while a tele-operated robot requires an operator's help in task-oriented activity. In emotional communication, an autonomous robot expresses robotic emotions by itself whereas a tele-operated robot delivers an operator's emotions to a receiver. In this study, we compared the impact of the two robot types on perceived intelligence and social presence of robots. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants had an interview with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers. They evaluated autonomous robots as more intelligent than tele-operated robots while they felt more social presence toward tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Implications for design of social robots to increase humans' emotional engagement with robots are discussed.

As empathy is important for the emotional interaction between a human and a robot, the design factors which induce human empathy toward robots need to be explored. Human empathy toward a robot can be affected by the presence of a robot. Thus, we focused on the levels of agency and the physical embodiment of a robot, which are influential factors pertaining to social presence, by executing two experiments. In the first experiment, in a 2 (levels of agency: mediated vs. simulated) between-participants experiment, participants interacted with either a mediated robot which delivers the emotional state of a remote user or a simulated robot which expresses its own emotion. Participants empathized more with the mediated robot than with the simulated robot, demonstrating that the proper form of an emotional robot is as a mediator during emotional interaction between people. In the second study, in a 2 (physical embodiment: physically embodied vs. physically disembodied) between-participants experiment design, participants interacted with either a physically embodied robot or a physically disembodied robot. The results showed that participants empathized more with a physically embodied robot than with a physically disembodied robot, indicating the impact of physical embodiment on human empathy. Implications for the design of human-robot interactions are discussed.

Interactive space has been suggested as a future direction for architectural development on the basis of technological advances, and the design factors that affect the user experience of space thus need to be explored. Motion is one of the critical means of affective expression for facial-constrained and verbal-constrained robots such as functional robots. This paper introduces an interactive robotic partition that recognizes a person around it and reacts to the person by expressing physical motions. Using the robotic partition, we conducted a 7 (type of motions: moving toward, moving away, expanding, contracting, incurving, outcurving, and trembling) × 2 (user perspective: approaching to the partition vs. sitting inside the partition) within-participants experiment (N = 28). Participants showed higher approachability to the space and greater preference for incurving and expanding motions than trembling motion. The results also showed an interaction effect between motion and user perspective. When the partition expressed moving toward and expanding motions, participants in a sitting perspective reported higher approachability and greater preference than participants with an approaching perspective whereas opposite results were revealed when the partition showed moving toward and contracting motions. Implications for design are discussed.

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of intergroup relations on robots through comparison with other objects. In an experiment, participants watched eight stimuli drawn from four types of objects (people vs. robots vs. animals vs. products) according to two types of intergroup relations (in-group vs. out-group) and rated each stimuli in terms of familiarity, reliability, and preference. Regarding familiarity and reliability, the effect of intergroup relations on robots was greater than that on animals or products, but smaller than that on people. The degree of the effect regarding reliability was larger than that regarding familiarity for all types of object. In the case of preference, the effects of intergroup relations between people and robots and between animals and products were similar, and the effect on people and robots was greater than that on animals and products.