Study of socially appropriate robot behaviors in human-robot conversation closure

Abstract

In human-robot communication, humans appear to have difficulty ending their conversations with robots due to a certain consideration toward the robot itself. Thus, verbal and nonverbal cues in robot behaviors are critical to ease conversational closure. In this study1, human participants observed either of three types of robot nonverbal behaviors, e.g., continual gestures by robot(Condition 1), reducing gestures(Condition 2) and gesture followed by adapter(Condition 3). All the conversations were videotaped, and the participants were interviewed after the experiment. The experimental results showed that adapter behaviors of robot helped to end a conversation. Furthermore, when the robot expressed adapters, the human followed suit, indicating that the participants wanted to end the conversation. These findings will contribute to the design of robot behavior that improves human-robot communication.