Human Impressions on Imperfect Robots in Cooperative Relationship

抄録

Communication robots such as partner or pet robots are machines that use artificial intelligence to communicate with humans. These robots need to behave naturally and convey a friendly impression to be a healing companion. Human imperfections such as making poor judgements, forgetting, and dropping things are at the heart of our human identity. Hence, to convey a more friendly impression, robots must conceivably display some believable imperfections. Therefore, this study aims to develop robots that make mistakes to convey a humanlike or friendly impression. Furthermore, this paper implements an emotional-state-driven decision model to reduce the bad impression effects that deliberate mistakes might convey, making it possible for human partners to relate robots’ mistakes to their emotional state. This is expected to let humans interpret the causes and tolerate such mistakes by associating to robots’ mistakes with a certain form of humanlike behavior. Moreover, this developed an interactive environment of humans and robots for a simple volleyball game to investigate the meaningfulness of our approach. Thereafter, an experimental evaluation was conducted in which participants interacted with two types of robots, perfect and imperfect. The experimental finding show that the imperfect robot displays some mistakes but conveys a good impression, demonstrating the potential of the proposed approach toward achieving stronger long-term social interaction between humans and robots.