Does Disturbance Discourage People from Communicating with a Robot?

We suggest that people's responses to a robot of which attention starts to be distracted show whether they accept the robot as an intentional communication partner or not. Human-robot interaction (HRI) as well as human-human interaction (HHI) is sometimes interrupted by disturbing factors. However, in HHI people continue to communicate with a partner because they presuppose that the partner may shift his/her interactive orientation based on his/her internal state. We designed a communication robot equipped with a mechanism of saliency-based visual attention and evaluated it in an observational experiment of HRI. Our sociological analysis of people's responses to our robot showed that it was accepted as a proactive communication agent. When the robot shifted its attention to an irrelative target, the human partners, for example, followed the line of the robot's gaze and tried to regain its attention by exaggerating their actions and increasing their communication channels as they would do toward a human partner. Based on these results, we conclude that disturbance can be an encouraging factor for human activity in HRI. The results are discussed from both a sociological and an engineering point of view.