Tabulation and analysis of questionnaire results of subjective evaluation of seal robot in Japan, U.K., Sweden and Italy

This paper describes research on a "mental commit robot". These robots have a different target audience to industrial robots, one that is not so rigidly dependent on objective measures such as accuracy and speed. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with the emphasis on human-robot interaction. In previous research, we classified robots into four categories, which related to their appearance. We then introduced a robot cat and a robot seal, which we evaluated by interviewing a large group of people. The results showed that physical interaction improved their subjective evaluation of the robots. Moreover, a priori knowledge of a subject has a considerable influence on the subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robots. In this paper, we asked several groups of subjects to evaluate the seal robot known as \´Paro\´ by answering questionnaires that were given out in exhibitions that were held in four different countries; Japan, U.K., Sweden and Italy. This paper reports the results of statistical analysis of the evaluation data.