BOOP! Investigating human altruism towards robots with a novel and reconfigurable social robot
May 2023 - ongoing
As robots increasingly co-inhabit spaces with people, there is a need for designing robots that people are comfortable interacting with. While the human-robot relationship typically exists to serve people, there will be instances when robots require human assistance. This project aims to investigate people’s willingness to help roots achieve a goal under various scenarios.
Using published literature to identify key desirable features of an interactive robot, this project began by designing and building a loosely anthropomorphic robot capable of expressing ‘emotions’ and expressing a ‘desire’ to interact with nearby people. The robot was given a ‘cute’ and ‘friendly’ form with abstracted zoomorphic and anthropomorphic features. It was given the ability to express itself through displayed speech, sounds, facial expressions and body language (gesturing with simple arms). It was then used as a research probe to explore people’s willingness to help it (by moving it between different ‘nests’ located either on the same desk, or significantly further apart in the same building) based on two different narratives (which differed in terms of their functional vs emotive content). Preliminary experiments suggest that increasing the effort required reduced people’s willingness to help when the functional narrative was employed. The use of a more emotionally engaging narrative led to the altruistic response of bystanders being maintained even when the request was more demanding.