Existential Crisis: A Social Robot's Reason for Being
This research addresses the need to understand user perception for social robots in daily life, but it is incremental as it builds on existing work in human-robot interaction.
The study investigated how displaying personality in a social robot affects user perception, finding that a personality-driven robot led to more positive emotional responses and perceptions compared to a task-oriented, neutral robot, with significant improvements in questionnaire scores.
As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using LLMs and speech to text technology, we designed a within-subject study to compare two conditions: a personality-driven robot and a purely task-oriented, personality-neutral robot. Twelve participants, recruited from Socially Intelligent Robotics course at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, interacted with a robot Nao tasked with asking them a set of medical questions under both conditions. After completing both interactions, the participants completed a user experience questionnaire measuring their emotional states and robot perception using standardized questionnaires from the SRI and Psychology literature.