Does Disturbance Discourage People from Communicating with a Robot?

We suggest that people´s responses to a robot of which attention starts to be distracted show whether they accept the robot as an intentional communication partner or not. Human-robot interaction (HRI) as well as human-human interaction (HHI) is sometimes interrupted by disturbing factors. However, in HHI people continue to communicate with a partner because they presuppose that the partner may shift his/her interactive orientation based on his/her internal state. We designed a communication robot equipped with a mechanism of saliency-based visual attention and evaluated it in an observational experiment of HRI. Our sociological analysis of people´s responses to our robot showed that it was accepted as a proactive communication agent. When the robot shifted its attention to an irrelative target, the human partners, for example, followed the line of the robot´s gaze and tried to regain its attention by exaggerating their actions and increasing their communication channels as they would do toward a human partner. Based on these results, we conclude that disturbance can be an encouraging factor for human activity in HRI. The results are discussed from both a sociological and an engineering point of view.