Eunil Park, Ki Joon Kim, and Angel P. del Pobil
HRI, gender, communication, gesture, interaction, robot
The present study explored the effects of robots’ gender and gesture on human perception. Although we can find many robots around us in the real world, most people view them as machine-based robots instead of human-like robots. Therefore, the present study focused on a particular interaction environment in which the effects of robots’ gender and gesture on psychological relationship between robots and humans in the HRI context. Our experiments were conducted with robots’ gender and participants’ gender as independent variables in Experiment 1 and presence of robots’ gesture and participants’ gender as independent variables in Experiment 2. Results showed that most participants preferred a robot with an opposite sex, suggesting that interacting with a robot with an opposite sex can make it more appealing than a situation in which the robot is perceived to be the same gender. This gender effect was much stronger between male subjects and a female robot, which was consistent with findings in existing communication studies in human-human interaction. Our results also showed that a presence of robot’s gesture is an important communication factor in HRI.
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