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As personal social robots become more prevalent, the need for the designs of these systems to explicitly consider pets become more apparent. However, it is not known whether dogs would interact with a social robot. In two experiments, we investigate whether dogs respond to a social robot after the robot called their names, and whether dogs follow the ‘sit’ commands given by the robot. We conducted a between-subjects study (n = 34) to compare dogs’ reactions to a social robot with a loudspeaker. Results indicate that dogs gazed at the robot more often after the robot called their names than after the loudspeaker called their names. Dogs followed the ‘sit’ commands more often given by the robot than given by the loudspeaker. The contribution of this study is that it is the first study to provide preliminary evidence that 1) dogs showed positive behaviors to social robots and that 2) social robots could influence dog’s behaviors. This study enhance the understanding of the nature of the social interactions between humans and social robots from the evolutionary approach. Possible explanations for the observed behavior might point toward dogs perceiving robots as agents, the embodiment of the robot creating pressure for socialized responses, or the multimodal (i.e., verbal and visual) cues provided by the robot being more attractive than our control condition.
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Perceptions of Conversational Group Membership based on Robots' Spatial Positioning: Effects of Embodiment
Robots' spatial positioning is a useful communication modality in social interactions. For example, in the context of group conversations, certain types of positioning signal membership to the group interaction. How does robot embodiment influence these perceptions? To investigate this question, we conducted an online study in which participants observed renderings of several robots in a social environment, and judged whether the robots were positioned to take part in a group conversation with other humans in the scene. Our results suggest that robot embodiment can influence perceptions of conversational group membership. An important factor to consider in this regard is whether robot embodiment leads to a discernible orientation for the agent.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1924802
- PAR ID:
- 10244159
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 372 to 376
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3434074.3447195
