Psychological analysis on human-robot interaction

For realizing a robot working in human society, interaction with humans is the key issue. We have developed a robot that interacts with humans based on visual recognition. This robot has two vision systems: an omnidirectional vision system for acquiring necessary visual information and a binocular stereo vision system. The binocular vision system indicates what the robot is looking at and is not used for locomotion. Gaze control plays an important role in human-robot interaction. This paper reports how the robot´s gaze influences subjects´ impressions of the robot. With a statistically significant number of robot observers, we employed psychological methods, the semantic differential method (SD), and factor analysis. This careful psychological analysis of robot impressions is the first trial in robotics. Through the experiment, we have found that the impressions mainly consist of four factors: familiarity, enjoyment, activity, and performance. The computer skills of subjects affect their impressions of the robot.