The role that an educational robot plays

Abstract

Human beings naturally assign roles to one another while interacting. Role assignment is a way to organize interpersonal encounters and can result in uncertainty decrease when facing a novel interaction with someone we just met, or even to rediscover new roles within previous relationships. When people interact with synthetic characters - such as robots - it seems they also assign roles to these agents, just as they do with humans. Within the field of human-robot interaction (HRI), robots are being developed to fulfill specific roles. This enables researchers to design concrete behaviors that match the desired role that a robot will play in a given task. It would then be expected that if a robot is developed with such a specific role, users too would assign the same role to that robot. In this paper, we study how children assign roles to an educational robot whose role is established from the beginning of the interaction. Our results show that although the role that the robot played was explicitly presented to children, they end up perceiving and assigning different roles for that robot. Moreover, we conclude that role assignment in educational HRI is a dynamic process in which the perceptions of children regarding the robot change over time as a consequence of continuous interactions.