Using an Android Robot to Improve Social Connectedness by Sharing Recent Experiences of Group Members in Human-Robot Conversations

• Published in: IEEE robotics and automation letters 2021-10, Vol.6 (4), p.6670-6677
• Main Authors: Fu, Changzeng, Liu, Chaoran, Ishi, Carlos Toshinori, Yoshikawa, Yuichiro, Iio, Takamasa, Ishiguro, Hiroshi
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Chatbots; COVID-19; Empirical analysis; Long-term interaction; Neural networks; Remote working; Robot sensing systems; Robots; social HRI; Training
• ISSN: 2377-3766; 2377-3766
• DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2021.3094779

Social connectedness is vital for developing group cohesion and strengthening belongingness. However, with the accelerating pace of modern life, people have fewer opportunities to participate in group-building activities. Furthermore, owing to the teleworking and quarantine requirements necessitated by the Covid-19 pandemic, the social connectedness of group members may become weak. To address this issue, in this study, we used an android robot to conduct daily conversations, and as an intermediary to increase intra-group connectedness. Specifically, we constructed an android robot system for collecting and sharing recent member-related experiences. The system has a chatbot function based on BERT and a memory function with a neural-network-based dialog action analysis model. We conducted a 3-day human-robot conversation experiment to verify the effectiveness of the proposed system. The results of a questionnaire-based evaluation and empirical analysis demonstrate that the proposed system can increase the familiarity and closeness of group members. This suggests that the proposed method is useful for enhancing social connectedness. Moreover, it can improve the closeness of the user-robot relation, as well as the performance of robots in conducting conversations with people.