Children Comply with a Robot’s Indirect Requests

Compliance studies in human-robot interaction (HRI) tend to consist of direct requests from the robot to the human. It is suggested that indirect requests are considered more polite, which has been positively correlated with learning gains. An experiment is conducted to explore compliance with indirect robot requests in teaching interactions. A comparison is made across embodiment conditions, but no significant differences are found. Overall, children comply with the robot's requests, which is used to support the hypothesis that given a well-defined context, children will infer the indirect meaning of a suggestion from a robot.