Developing Technologies for Regulating Robot Persuasion in Human-Robot Interaction

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Robots are emerging as viable tools in domains including personal care, education, and search and rescue, where they increasingly work alongside people as autonomous or semi-autonomous tools and assistants. In addition to the difficult robotics engineering challenges, robots that enter people's spaces must also have effective interface technologies that support human-robot interaction and enable the general public - not only robotics experts - to work with robots, give commands, and to get data from them.Robots collocated with people use human-like social techniques such as gestures or gaze, leveraging people's existing inter-personal skills to simplify interaction. These social robots will often be in positions where they offer recommendations to people, and research has shown how expert-reference robots can be more persuasive than anticipated, in part due to people's trust in robotic memory, knowledge, and computational ability. This can be dangerous, for example a healthcare provider may doubt their assessment when contradicted by a specialized healthcare robot, but can also be desirable, for example a persuasive rehabilitation robot could help with recovery exercises. Research has established that robots can be persuasive, but little is known about how to practically create a robot to interact with people to either avoid or encourage persuasion. In the short term, I propose to develop the first interaction framework and technologies that demonstrate how robots can modify their persuasiveness by changing how they interact with people, specifically targeting how a robot can use its body language. In the long term, my program will help build a solid understanding and array of tools for programming robots to interact effectively and appropriately with people.My program will methodologically investigate how robots can use their physical body to impact persuasion; specifically, how robots can use their gestures, posture, gaze, and use of interpersonal space, to increase or decrease persuasiveness. I will implement and formally evaluate original interface technologies and algorithms for enabling robots to leverage these techniques for interaction. For this I will establish the first methodologies and metrics for measuring and comparing persuasiveness of robotic designs, and conduct a series of experiments to develop interface design frameworks for engineering robot persuasion.This work will provide foundations for understanding how nuanced robotic behaviors can impact persuasion, including persuasion-oriented interface guidelines, and some of the first interaction techniques and algorithms for architecting robotic persuasion. Ultimately, this will be important for enabling human-robot interaction programmers to be in control of their robots: to reduce the persuasiveness of robots in potentially dangerous situations, or make robots more convincing when appropriate.