Investigating the Relationship between Believability and Presence during a Collaborative Cognitive Task with a Socially Interactive Robot

Abstract

The use of socially interactive robots in people's homes and workplaces will continue to grow. To test such systems before deployment, most human-robot interaction experiments are usually conducted in a research laboratory or require the physical presence of the robot. These experiments are usually time-consuming, costly, and, in most cases, require an experimenter to be present. To address this problem, we have developed a web-based research platform in which participants can remotely interact with a socially interactive robot shown via video based on a behavior profile programmed via a Wizard-of-Oz framework. To help us validate the believability when using this platform, we compared participant's responses to a physical presence robot with that to a remote presence robot during a problem-solving scenario. Participants were asked to complete a series of cognitive tasks with the help of the robot. We analyzed participant's tendency to take the robot's advice, their feelings before and after the experiment, and a quantitative assessment about believability. The experimental results indicate that there was a high degree of agreement between participants' behaviors in the two conditions and only minor changes in feelings before and after the experiment. The survey responses found no significant difference in their overall rating for believability, suggesting the equivalency of believability between the two conditions.