A request of the robot: an experiment with the human-robot interactive system HuRIS

Discusses about the interface for personal robot systems that are not supported by social authority. The paper consists of two parts. The paper describes HuRIS, a human-robot interactive system for supporting human-robot and human-human communication. HuRIS aims to be acting as an agent of a user. The robot of HuRIS can accept voice commands by its voice recognizer, and can reply via its simple natural language processing system and voice synthesizer. The robot has the ability of asking a human for help by using the voice synthesizer when it is trapped in failure. However, the humans around the robot do not always accept its commissions. The necessary condition that a human accepts a request of a robot is not known. The authors describe experiments on robot´s commission in some detail. In Experiment 1, they show that a request of a robot supported by no social authority is not accepted by a human. In Experiment 2, they show that by using the HuRIS´s interface, the performance of the subjects is generally similar for human and robot commission. The paper concludes that the interface for HuRIS as a personal mobile robot system is effective