Initiating interactions in order to get help: Effects of social framing on people´s responses to robots´ requests for assistance

Robots often need to ask humans for help, for instance to complete a human component in a larger task or to recover from an unforeseen error. In this paper, we explore how robots can initiate interactions with people in order to ask for help. We discuss a study in which a robot initiated interaction with a participant by producing either an acoustic signal or a verbal greeting. Thereafter, the robot produced a gesture in order to request help in performing a task. We investigate the effect that social framing by means of a verbal greeting may have on people´s attention to the robot, on their recognition of the robot´s actions and intention, and on their willingness to help. The results show that social framing, in contrast to other methods for getting a person´s continued attention, is effective and increases how friendly the robot appears. However, it has little influence on people´s willingness to assist the robot, which rather depends on the activities people are engaged in, and on the readability of the robot´s request.