Evaluation of emotional influence in communicating with a robot

Communicative robots have studied as a mediator to obtain the information in Human-robot interaction research field. The study in this paper presents that people have emotional feelings during interacting with robot by the comparison experiment conducted as two assignment, ifbot-assignment and web-assignment. 62 subjects are participated in both assignments. Ifbot assignment is to get a particular information by verbal communication with a robot. Web assignment is to search the same information by using a limited search engine. The emotions of participants are assessed by the questionnaire regarding eight different emotional status. As a result, the participants experienced more strongly emotional feelings, such as “Depression”, “Boredom”, “Liveliness”, “Friendliness”, and “Startlement”, in the ifbot assignment than web assignment. Moreover, participants are divided into five groups based on the statistical tests.