Prototyping and Testing of a Social Robot for TV-Watching Experiments

摘要

We have described the functional requirements and implementation methods for a TV-viewing companion robot that operates autonomously, without intervention by a human operator. The results of experiments in which a prototype of the robot viewed TV programs over a period of six hours with each of three groups of two experimental participants in a mock environment confirmed autonomous operation and performance of disclosure, question-asking, and conversation functions.The results also provided guidelines for future development, including the importance of timing of robot speech acts, suppression of repeating questions to the same user, and the need for quieter operation for robot gestures.