Different Age Groups Comparison on Impression Evaluation of Rewarding/Punitive Behavior with Gestures and Gaze of Robots

As social robots play an increasingly active role in nursing care and medical fields, opportunities for robots to communicate with people of all ages are expected to increase. It is important for robots to persuade people to act in order to encourage them to achieve a specific goal. We believe that it is necessary to identify a strategy for robot behavior that can encourage people to take action to finally achieve their goals, even if they refuse to be persuaded by the robot. Therefore, we propose a strategy that incorporates not only robot behaviors that people feel comfortable with, but also dares to incorporate uncomfortable behaviors at effective times. In this strategy, we set up two types of robot behaviors: rewarding behavior and punitive behavior. Reward behaviors are favorable, expresses positive empathy, and is willing to accept instructions and cooperatively perform actions. Punitive behaviors are not favorable, expresses negative empathy, and makes people feel uncomfortable, such that they do not want to accept instructions and cooperatively perform actions. In this paper, we conducted a study on adult and older adult subjects to investigate the impression of the robot's gaze behavior, gestures and voice, which were designed as rewarding and punitive behaviors.