Leveraging Robot Embodiment to Facilitate Trust and Smoothness

Abstract

Interactions with social robots in public and private spaces are becoming more and more common and varied. As this trend continues, it is important to understand how a robot's embodiment influences its ability to calibrate trust and comfort with its users and behave in accordance with social norms. This is especially true when one social intelligence embodies multiple physical robots (re-embodiment). We have conducted two studies-one quantitative and and one qualitative-which shed light on the way robots should be embodied and re-embodied by intelligences during different types of social interactions. This paper outlines our previous work on elucidating the role of embodiment in social interactions and experimenting with re-embodiment as a design paradigm, and it describes the directions in which we plan to take this research in the near future.