Exploratory evaluation of politeness in human-robot interaction
This addresses interaction quality in human-robot collaboration, particularly for older adults, but is incremental as it builds on existing politeness frameworks.
The study investigated how politeness affects human-robot interaction in a collaborative table-setting task, finding that participants significantly preferred polite robot behavior, though older adults struggled to distinguish between politeness levels.
Aiming to explore the impact of politeness on Human robot interaction, this study tested varying levels of politeness in a human robot collaborative table setting task. Polite behaviour was designed based on the politeness rules of Lakoff. A graphical user interface was developed for the interaction with the robot offering three levels of politeness, and an experiment was conducted with 20 older adults and 30 engineering students. Results indicated that the quality of interaction was influenced by politeness as participants significantly preferred the polite mode of the robot. However, the older adults were less able to distinguish between the three politeness levels. Future studies should thus include pre experiment training to increase the familiarity of the older adults with robotic technology. These studies should also include other permutations of the politeness rules of Lakoff.