Designing robot-to-robot interaction to support early-stage engagement in a teleoperated Robot Avatar system with...

Teleoperated Robot Avatars enable operators to provide customer service from remote locations. Effective persuasive interaction requires more than information presentation; customers' attention and engagement must be elicited before their attitudes and behavior can be influenced. Social presence may support this type of engagement. Based on prior research, we conceptualize a Robot Avatar's social presence as the extent to which customers perceive it, i.e., not as a machine or information medium, but as a social entity customers can attend to and interact with. Therefore, we examined a design approach intended to enhance a Robot Avatar's social presence by forming a social context around it. We developed GayaRobo, comprising one teleoperated Robot Avatar and two supporting Gaya robots. Rather than approaching users as independent agents, the Gaya robots respond to the Robot Avatar's utterances via speech and movement, thereby forming a social context centered on the avatar. We conducted a field experiment at a commercial complex in Osaka, Japan, to compare observable early-stage engagement behaviors of passersby toward the Robot Avatar across three experimental conditions. The same three-robot configuration was used under three conditions: the Gaya robots responded to the Robot Avatar, only the Robot Avatar spoke, or only the Gaya robots spoke. Two annotators coded four behaviors among 1,379 passersby in 270 min of video recordings: looking at the Robot Avatar, approaching it, talking to it, and picking up a flyer. After correction for multiple testing, only approaching the Robot Avatar was significantly associated with experimental condition and occurred more frequently than expected under the inter-robot interaction condition. These findings provide behavioral evidence that the inter-robot interaction condition was associated with approaching the Robot Avatar, an observable indicator of early-stage engagement. Because social presence was not directly measured, the findings did not demonstrate that GayaRobo enhanced the Robot Avatar's social presence. Nevertheless, they highlight approach behavior as a relevant observable outcome for future evaluations of designs that consider the social context surrounding a Robot Avatar in customer service settings.