Active or passive?: Investigating the impact of robot role in meetings

Meetings are an integral part of the work place and society in general. Research in Computer Supported Cooperative Work attempts to facilitate and make the process of meetings more effective. Our vision is that the incorporation of social robots in such human-human collaborative settings can assist and improve the effectiveness of a meeting. In this paper we present an empirical study in which pairs of participants collaborate in a meeting scenario with a Nao humanoid robot. Using a within-subjects design, we manipulated the robot´s role within the meeting as being either “active” versus “passive”/“service-oriented”. Our results show that the more active robot was deemed as more more alive and social, had the participants more emotionally involved and caused more verbal engagement from the participants as compared to a passive service robot. In conclusion, we speculate on the inclusion of a collaborative robot as a meeting partner.