Empirical Investigation of Factors that Influence Human Presence and Agency in Telepresence Robot

TL;DR

This study investigates how facial features and motion in telepresence robots influence human perception of presence and agency through web-based experiments.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on the effects of robot face type and motion on human presence and agency perceptions in telepresence robots.

Findings

Human-like faces increase perceived agency.

Robot motion enhances sense of human presence.

Face type and motion interactively affect perception.

Abstract

Nowadays, a community starts to find the need for human presence in an alternative way, there has been tremendous research and development in advancing telepresence robots. People tend to feel closer and more comfortable with telepresence robots as many senses a human presence in robots. In general, many people feel the sense of agency from the face of a robot, but some telepresence robots without arm and body motions tend to give a sense of human presence. It is important to identify and configure how the telepresence robots affect a sense of presence and agency to people by including human face and slight face and arm motions. Therefore, we carried out extensive research via web-based experiment to determine the prototype that can result in soothing human interaction with the robot. The experiments featured videos of a telepresence robot n = 128, 2 x 2 between-participant study robot face factor: video-conference, robot-like face; arm motion factor: moving vs. static) to investigate the factors significantly affecting human presence and agency with the robot. We used two telepresence robots: an affordable robot platform and a modified version for human interaction enhancements. The findings suggest that participants feel agency that is closer to human-likeness when the robot's face was replaced with a human's face and without a motion. The robot's motion invokes a feeling of human presence whether the face is human or robot-like.