Social Robots: Mimicking Human Behavior During Conversation

Social robots are designed to interact with people, sometimes requiring assistance to meet their goals. While some social robots are created to assist humans, others have physical limitations that push them to ask for help. In this experiment SARAH, a social robot without arms, requires the assistance of a person in order to change floors using the elevator. For SARAH to succeed she must be able to engage someone in a short conversation and have them assist with a task. A dynamic social robot takes advantage of nonverbal cues such as gestures may be more successful in interacting with a person than a static robot that does not take advantage of nonverbal cues. SARAH has been programmed with a set of gestures made to mimic common gestures used by people in conversations. This experiment investigates whether the use of the gestures influences people's perception of SARAH's intelligence, naturalness, and other qualities.