Introducing Playing Catch to Motivate Interaction with Communication Robots

Abstract

The deployment of communication robots is increasing to address the problem of labor shortage caused by population decrease. However, individuals may still exhibit resistance or reluctance to communicate with robots owing to a lack of trust or other reasons. In this study, we explore the possibility of incorporating ice-breaking activities into human-robot interaction to make people more inclined to communicate with robots. Here, we focus on playing catch as an ice-breaking activity because it is easy and suitable for the conversational process and has elements for a turn-taking mechanism and collaboration of participants. The proposed method involves a robot and human speaker alternating throwing a ball and speaking during the conversation. In the verification, we compared two conditions, the playing catch condition and the non-playing catch condition, to verify the effect of playing catch with a robot on the motivation for conversation and interaction. The results indicated that, while the impact of playing catch on the affinity and motivation for conversation with robots could not be established, the visual representation of turn-taking through the movement of the ball enabled a more natural pace of conversation.