Towards enhancing human experience by affective robots: Experiment and discussion

Many studies have addressed the affective robot, a robot that can express emotion, in the field of human-robot interaction. Really useful applications, however, can only be designed if the effect of such expressions on the user are completely elucidated. In this paper, we propose a new useful application scenario for the affective robot that shares the user's experience and describe an experiment in which the user's experience is altered by the presence of the affective robot. As the stimulus, we use movie scenes to evoke 4 types of emotion: excitement, fright, depression, and relaxation. Twenty four participants watch different movies under three conditions: no robot present, with robot that offers appropriate emotional expression, and with robot that has random emotional expression. The results show that the participants watching with the appropriate emotion robot experienced stronger emotion with exciting and relaxing movies and weaker emotion with scary movies than is true without the robot. These changes in the viewer's experience did not occur when watching with the random emotion robot. From the results, we extract design points of affective robot behavior for enhancing user experience. This research is novel in terms of examining the impact of robot emotion, seen as appropriate by the viewer, on the viewer's experience.