POLITE ROBOTS

RESEARCH SUMMARY

Social and functional aspect of interaction plays a vital role in the acceptance of robotic technology. Politeness, one aspect of social behaviour in human-human interaction is known to increase coordination amongst individuals and remove conflicts. To increase the acceptability of robots amongst older adults, this research is focused on developing and evaluating the effect of politeness in human-robot interaction. Politeness has been developed with the help of theory defined in the socio-linguistic field. Based on Lakoff theory of politeness, three different levels of politeness were developed for a table setting task with a robotic manipulator. An empirical study was conducted with three different levels of politeness among four groups. The groups included students with engineering background, non-engineering students without prior training, non-engineering student with prior training and older adults.
The results of the study revealed that the polite behaviour of the robot was preferred by all participants and all groups. However, statistical significant was not observed in different measures of interaction for differentiating between the three levels of politeness except for the engineering students. Excitement in the first interaction with robot was also observed in case of the older adults and non-engineering student without training. This could explain the non-observed statistical difference in the different measures as the participants were swamped with the robot’s movement and could not observe difference. This also could not be eradicated by the training with robot in case of non-engineering students.
However, all groups and participants preferred polite behaviour as compared to impolite behaviour indicating that polite robots have a potential to be acceptable to older adults. Ongoing research is aimed at developing polite robots for a mobile robot and further experimentation to derive guidelines for developing polite robots.