Cooperation with a robotic assistant

Abstract

Robotic assistants soon will serve many assistive roles in our everyday lives. It is important to understand how these robots can interact with users, not just as tools, but also as social agents. In a controlled laboratory experiment, we examined cooperation in an effortful task with a robot that displayed one of two personalities. We found that a serious, caring robot induced more compliance than a playful, ejoybale robot on this task. We propose possible explanations and further research.