Creative collaboration with a social robot

Abstract

This research builds on the UbiComp vision of systems that do not do things for people but engage people in their computational environment so that people can do things for themselves better. In this investigation, we sought to make good on a proof-of-concept where people interact with a social robot whereby the robot helps people to be more humanly creative. Twenty seven participants interacted with ATR's humanoid robot Robovie (through a WoZ interface) in a creativity task. Results supported our proof of concept insofar as 100% of the participants generated creative ideas, and 63% incorporated the robot's ideas into their own ideas for their creative output. Of the participants who had the highest creativity scores, 83% incorporated the robot's ideas into their own. Discussion focuses on next steps toward building the Natural Language Processing system, and integrating the system into a more extensive networked UbiComp environment.