Showing awareness of humans' context to involve humans in interaction

Abstract

This paper proposes a robot communication strategy that enables a human's context to be incorporated into a robot's context. The strategy's fundamental principle is that a robot will show awareness of a human's context. In our pilot study, many participants did not actually start interacting with the robot, but tested its functionality. According to the results of that pilot study, we implemented a robot with behaviors that showed awareness of such peculiar human's behaviors. We conducted a field experiment to verify the effectiveness of the robot's behaviors for showing awareness. The results indicated that showing awareness can be a method for involving humans in an interaction with a robot.