Speed effects in touching behaviours: impact on perceived relationships in robot-robot interactions

摘要

As a form of multiple-robot interaction, robot-robot interactions effectively provide indirect information, unlike direct interactions between people and robots. Even though numerous studies have affirmed this approach's effectiveness and the development of conversational mechanisms for robot-robot interaction, their physical interaction design has received inadequate attention. This study focuses on the impact of the speed of robots' touching behaviours because people might perceive such relationships between robots differently due to various motion speeds, even with identical motions. We explored this issue by conducting two web-survey experiments and investigated the human perceptions of a robot's touching motion and the perceived relationship between two robots when one robot touches the other at different speeds. Experiment 1 identified two peak speeds at which people perceived a robot's touch as patting (a friendly touch) or slapping (an aggressive touch). Experiment 2 demonstrated similar peak speeds, where people perceived the robots' relationships as either positive or negative in response to patting or slapping behaviours. We maintain that understanding the relationships between motion speeds and perceived friendliness between robots will significantly improve the design of physical interactions between robots.