Human-Robot Partnership: A Study on Collaborative Storytelling

Abstract

The tradition of storytelling is a distinctive human experience. There have been increasing evidences from social sciences that storytelling facilitates skill development in children. In this paper, we explore the use of humanoid robots to augment traditional storytelling, an area still understudied, to investigate the effectiveness of human-robot collaboration (HRC) in storytelling. In our experiment, a humanoid robot, Aldebaran's Nao, was programmed to recite a mystery story to 60 students aged 14 to 15, while engaging them through gestures, simulated eye contacts and varied voices. Nao delivered the performance as either an independent storyteller, or as a collaborator with a human storyteller. We assessed the effectiveness of HRC by comparing the participants' preference over the two settings. We found that 1) most participants prefer HRC over the robot-only performance (RO) and considered HRC effective; and 2) the preference in HRC is explained by the complementary strengths of the robot and human storyteller in interacting with the participants. These results, provide a first step towards effective use of robots for collaborative storytelling in day-to-day situations, which is well placed to guide the design of robots for education and entertainment purposes.