Exploring the use of robots as social mediators in a remote human-human collaborative communication experiment

Our long-term goal is to develop robots as social mediators that can support human-human communication in remote interaction scenarios. This paper explores the effects of an autonomous robot on human-human remote communication and studies participants’ preferences in comparison with a communication system not involving robots. We developed a platform for remote human-human communication in the context of a collaborative computer game. The exploratory study involved twenty pairs of participants who communicated using video conference software. Participants expressed more social cues when using the robot and sharing of their game experiences with each other. However, analyses of the interactions of the participants with each other and with the robot show that it is difficult for participants to familiarise themselves quickly with the robot while they can perform the same task more efficiently with conventional devices. These issues need to be carefully considered and addressed when designing human-human remote communication systems with robots as social mediators.