Cooperation · Trust

Abstract This paper explores how a robot’s physical pres-ence affects human judgments of the robot as a social part-ner. For this experiment, participants collaborated on simple book-moving tasks with a humanoid robot that was either physically present or displayed via a live video feed. Multi-ple tasks individually examined the following aspects of so-cial interaction: greetings, cooperation, trust, and personal space. Participants readily greeted and cooperated with the robot whether present physically or in live video display. However, participants were more likely both to fulfill an un-usual request and to afford greater personal space to the ro-bot when it was physically present, than when it was shown on live video. The same was true when the live video dis-played robot’s gestures were augmented with disambiguat-ing 3-D information. Questionnaire data support these be-havioral findings and also show that participants had an overall more positive interaction with the physically present robot