Adaptive embodied entrainment control and interaction design of the first meeting introducer robot

Abstract

This paper describes a robotic agent that can promote communication when people first meet. When two people meet for the first time, a communication mediator can be important because people often feel stressed and cannot talk comfortably. Our agent reduces their stress by using embodied entrainment and thus promotes communication. In the research field of embodied entrainment, suitable timing of a nod or back-channel feedback has been discussed, but situations to communicate in are limited. We have developed an embodied entrainment control system that recognizes communication states and adapts to them accordingly. For this, we focus on effective non-verbal information for communication. Using this information, our agent helps a talker and a listener to alternate their roles appropriately. We conducted communication experiments with the agent and confirmed its effectiveness. In the experiments, we used and compared different representation of the agent: an embodied robot agent, a computer graphics agent, and no agent. We report the comparison results and discuss representations for communication agents.