How do users interact with a pet-robot and a humanoid

Abstract

In this paper, we compare users' interaction with the humanoid robot ASIMO and the dog-shaped robot AIBO. We conducted a user study in which the participants had to teach object names and simple commands and give feedback to either AIBO or ASIMO. We did not find significant differences in the users' evaluation of both robots and in the way commands were given to the two different robots. However, the way of giving positive and negative feedback differed significantly: We found that for the pet-robot AIBO users tend to give reward in a similar way as giving reward to a real dog by touching it and commenting on its performance by uttering feedback like "well done" or "that was right". For the humanoid ASIMO, users did not use touch as a reward and rather used personal expressions like "thank you" to give positive feedback to the robot.