Cooperative tabletop working for humans and humanoid robots: Group interaction with an avatar

This paper represents the first steps in investigating issues emerging from a scenario where a robot interacts with a group of people around an interactive tabletop. In particular, the impact that a humanoid robot, acting as an avatar for a remote member of the group, has on the collaboration between the members of the group is investigated. This is carried out in the context where the avatar is depicting the actions being carried out by the remote user during a game. A preliminary study was performed to find out how the users interact when they are all co-located. The experiment is then carried out in two variants, in the first, a member of the group is moved to a remote location and allowed to interact with the other members using audio support alone. In the second, a robot is used to represent the actions of the remote user to the co-located users. The results obtained indicate that the addition of an avatar, used in such a way, has a positive impact on group interaction and allows for the task to be completed more successfully than when the avatar is not used. Further, comparative analysis of videos of the group behavior with a co-located team and group behavior with one member represented by the robot avatar, showed similar cooperative action.