Telepresence Robot's Salutations to Trigger Informal Conversation with Teleworkers

Abstract

Surveys show that teleworkers tend to feel isolated due to the lack of informal communication. To solve this problem, we propose a telepresence robot system that triggers informal communication. Drawing on Kendon's finding of greeting structure prior to interaction, we propose a system that presents two salutations, distance salutation and close salutation. Our experiment with a prototype system suggests that the proposed method is effective in inducing informal communication over the distance.