A Robot with Style, because you are Worth it!

Toronto, CanadaInternational audienceResearch in social human-robot interaction gets more and more of its inspiration from psychology to make robots' behaviour more socially acceptable when among humans. However, which theorems of human cognition and psychology can be made applicable for robots and to make them communicate like humans is a domain currently being worked on. In the context of rendering a robot more suitable to be a companion for children, we propose di erent parenting styles (namely authoritative and permissive) and evaluate them. As a rst step, we use expression cues of the parenting styles; we implemented behaviours of di erent styles played out by two robots, Nao and Reeti, with body and facial channels respectively for communication. 88 parents watched videos of the robots and replied to a questionnaire about the authoritativeness of the robots. The results showed that the expression by the robots were accurate. Authoritative style was found to be more directive than permissive style, which validates the hypothesis. We also notice an e ect of the robot's modality of expressions; further work should con rm hypotheses on the modality's e ects of the perception on authoritativeness of the robot