Both “look and feel” matter: Essential factors for robotic companionship

Abstract

Physical embodiment of robots provides users with a social environment. To design social robots further to be accepted as our companions, we need to understand the essential factors and implement them and so, users get to bring them to their personal environments. To this aim, we focused on two important factors in robotic companionship: robot appearance (look) and emotional expression (feel). Twenty-one participants played an online game with the help from two humanoid robots, Nao (more human-like looking) and Darwin (less human-like looking). Participants interacted with each robot either with emotional words or without emotional words. Results show that only when the robot both looks more human-like and speaks with emotional expression, participants perceive it as their companion. Implications are discussed with future works.