Exploring the Social Bonding That Evolves Between a Human and a Minimally Designed Accompanying Robot

Abstract

In our article we try to promote the measurement of four measures for the quantification of social bonding between humans and robots. We use these measures to assess social bonding in the presence of verbal and gestural interactions in “proactive” and “reactive” versions of a minimally designed accompanying robot called ROBOMO. The approach aims to measure four factors which are: “belief ”, “attachment”, “commitment” and “involvement”. This is achieved by assigning different metrics to each of the four different factors. Our proposed approach is evaluated in a human-robot interaction (HRI) study while ROBOMO provides some gestures and produces inarticulate utterances as verbal indicators. As a first step, we try to validate the proposed four measures of social bonding. For that, we compare the social bonding values in the following different conditions: “robot using only gestures”, “robot using only verbal behaviors”, “robot combining gestural and verbal behaviors”. Since it is obvious that combining verbal and gestural behaviors may increase the user's preference of the robot and thus social bonding, the proposed metrics values have to increase in such conditions. We show, based on the results, that indeed, the different four elements measuring social bonding increased in such q condition accordingly, making our measures for the quantification of social bonding reliable. In addition, this also makes our proposed metrics useful for assessing social bonding when we decide to add future behaviors and modifications to the designed robot. For the second step, we selected two types of behavior modes being “proactive” and “reactive” and we used our proposed validated different metrics to define which behavior mode may lead to higher social bonding. Based on the results, we show that in the context of a minimally designed accompanying robot, a proactive mode adopted by the robot is preferred over a reactive mode. In fact, it leads to an amelioration of the social bonding.