The autonomy levels and the human intervention levels of robots: The impact of robot types in human-robot interaction

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the robot types on emotional engagement with robots. Robots are classified into an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot according to the levels of autonomy. On the contrary, robots could be distinguished depending on the levels of human intervention required for controlling a robot. An autonomous robot performs task by itself while a tele-operated robot requires an operator´s help in task-oriented activity. In emotional communication, an autonomous robot expresses robotic emotions by itself whereas a tele-operated robot delivers an operator´s emotions to a receiver. In this study, we compared the impact of the two robot types on perceived intelligence and social presence of robots. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants had an interview with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers. They evaluated autonomous robots as more intelligent than tele-operated robots while they felt more social presence toward tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Implications for design of social robots to increase humans´ emotional engagement with robots are discussed.