Interacting with a human or a humanoid robot?

Recently, remote-controlled communication robots have been studied. Our question is whether the person interacting with them feels that he/she is interacting with the robot itself or the human behind it. How do such beliefs affect interaction? We conducted an experiment to study the effect of a human presence behind an interactive humanoid robot. We used an interactive robot system based on a motion-capturing system where participants can bodily interact with the robot. They were deceptively informed that they would either be interacting with a robot controlled by a program or a human; in fact, in both conditions the robot was autonomous. Experimental results indicated that two-thirds of the participants felt that they were interacting with the robot itself. Their enjoyment was unaffected by the knowledge of whether the robot was controlled by a program or a human, although their impression of robot intelligence indicated that they distinguished between these conditions. On the contrary, since the remaining one-third of the participants felt they were interacting with a human behind the robot, they were affected by the knowledge: when they were told they were interacting with a teleoperated robot, they enjoyed it less; in contrast, their enjoyment increased when they were told they were interacting with an autonomous robot.