Tatsuya Nomura, Takayuki Kanda,
Tomoshiro Suzuki, Kensuke Kato
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol.
24, No. 2, April 2008
Summary
Robot are being capable to operate more and more
together with humans, but still it may be into account that not all people may
accept novel robots, as for Joinson (2002), opinions toward novel communication
technologies tend to be highly polarized, so people might have negative
attitudes and emotions toward novel robots. Studies have been done to
understand the effects of human robot interaction on humans’ behavior, but non
of them has addressed which kind of person might have difficulties in relating
with robots and investigations on which kind of negative attitudes or emotions
haven’t been done. The authors focus on anxiety and negative attitudes toward
robots. In psychology attitude is defined as a relatively stable and enduring
predisposition to behave in a certain way toward other people or element
surrounding, while anxiety is defined as an apprehension state of the future
about a specific fear. Anxiety is classified in trait anxiety (the trend of
anxiety as a stable characteristic) and state anxiety (which is transiently
evoked in specific situation that change according on situation and time). NARS
is developed to determine human attitudes towards robots, the authors
investigates mainly 3 possible states: S1) negative attitude toward social influence
of robots; S2) Negative attitude toward the social influence of robots; S3)
negative attitude toward emotional interaction with robots. A questionnaire has
been performed (page 444). RAS is developed for measuring human anxiety toward
robots evoked in real and imaginary HRI situations, in this case the these
possible states issued are: S1) Anxiety toward communication capacity of
robots; S2) Anxiety toward behavioral characteristics of robots; S3) Anxiety
toward discourse with robots. Also in this case a questionnaire has been
performed. Computer anxiety could be associated with robot anxiety, although it
is a kind of state anxiety, while robot anxiety is only weakly correlated with
state anxiety. These psychological scales in HRI may been useful, if we
consider for example Friedman et. Al analyzed analyzed online discussion on the
Aibo forum and found that people are not enthusiastic about a robotic dog, but
are aware it’s a robot while interacting with it. The authors performed an experiment on university
student in Japan using “Robovie”, a human-like robot designed for communication
with robots and provided with different kind of sensor systems. The experiment
involved the subjects compile the questionnaire for NARS and RAS, walk into the
room where the robot was and greet it, they were asked to enter in the room
alone and move in front of the robot, then they had to talk for 30 seconds with
the robot, after which Robotvie would interact with the subjects asking
questions, after the answer the subjects would be asked to touch the robot. At
the end of the experiment each subject was asked to respond the RAS once again
to check differences with the previously answered survey. Parameters to be
tested appear to be: D) distance from the robot at first sight; U1) time before
subject talked after entering the room; U2) time after which the subject
replied to the robot; T) time before the subject touched the robot.
Key
Concepts
Human Robot Interaction,
Effect of Robot on Human behavior
Key Results
The experiments shows that
for that: male have positive relations between U1 and RAS-S3, T and RAS-S1, T
and RAS-S2 and negative influence is between U1 and NARS-S1, T and NARS-S3 and
also NARS-S2, although not statistically significant. For women positive
influence is between D and RAS-S1 ad NARS-S1, NARS-S3 and U2 and negatively
between D and NARS-S2. No significant different was therefore noted between
genders. Subjects with emotional utterances toward robots were found with
higher negative attitude and anxiety toward interaction with robots than those
with no-emotional utterances. Some correlation per gender were find between
NARS and RAS. The paper demonstrates influence attitude have from robotics.
