Designing robot behavior in conversations based on contemporary colloquial theatre theory

Due to human sensitivity for humanlike objects, designing human-like behavior for a robot that interacts with humans remains a central issue in the HRI field. This issue is formidable because human-likeness is an important factor for better interaction since it can easily convey negative impressions if the design is not perfect, as in the uncanny valley phenomena. This paper addresses this issue with a novel approach that utilizes implicit know-how for performing on stage and is dedicated to represent human beings. Contemporary colloquial theatre theory (CCTT), which is a method of directing plays, is appropriate for this purpose since its reality-oriented instructions are directly applicable for improving robot behavior. In this paper, we report case studies on performing a play involving both humans and a robot. The play in our study was evaluated in public performances in Japan. We report detailed analysis of comparable short plays on human-robot interaction or human-human-robot interaction. Our analysis implies that utterance and motion timings should be tuned depending on the situation. Future work will use a motion capture system to get more precise data and more useful knowledge.