Investigating the Influence of Task-dependent and Task-independent Robot Behavior on the Impression of Robots and the User Experience

Service robots are beginning to be used as a new kind of support for human labor. However, in many cases, we implement only specific task-dependent behaviors in robots according to the purpose of robot introduction, and rarely implement task-independent behaviors. In general, it is known that noninstrumental functions are one factor that improves user experience. Therefore, task-independent behavior of robots as an aspect of noninstrumental functions also has the potential to improve the impression made by robots and deliver a user experience beyond the users’ expectations, during human-robot interaction. This study aims to investigate the influence of task-dependent behavior and task-independent behavior on the impression made by robots, and user experience. We extracted, from previous studies, dialogue task-dependent and dialogue task-independent behaviors during human-robot interaction, and investigated the influence of these behaviors through a video-based survey. The result of the video-based survey shows that dialogue task-dependent behavior improves the functionality of robots and decreases factors of negative user experience, such as frustration, while also fulfilling users’ expectation for interaction with robots. It also shows that dialogue task-independent behavior builds a stronger relationship between users and robots and provides a user experience that exceeds users’ expectation regarding interaction with robots.