User responses to social robots - experimental insights and psychophysiological measures

Abstract

Companies in China, Japan and USA started introducing social robots at the customer interface in various industries, such as hospitality services, retailing, and health care services. In contrast to production robots, social robots are humanoid and communicate with speech and gestures with the primary purpose to interact with humans. While the prevalence of social robots is increasing, knowledge about the user acceptance of these robots is scarce. Based on an experimental series, potential stressors as well as emotional and behavioral user responses to the interaction with a social robot are examined. The experimental setting was a hotel reception, in which participants had to interact with the social robot (i.e., the humanoid robot Pepper) in the role of a hotel guest. Participants' psychological responses to the social robot were assessed via self-assessments of the participants. Beyond these standard measures, external raters evaluated the participants' responses by evaluating their facial expressions and gestures on the basis of the video recordings of the experimental procedure. Furthermore, a non-intrusive wearable device, Empatica E4, was used to measure physiological data, in particular heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV) and electrodermal activity (EDA). Results show that participants were able to clearly recognize robotic emotions and behaviors. Furthermore, we could reveal similar patterns within a human-robot-interaction as compared to human-human-interactions.