Investigation on Robot User Interface for Information Access

This paper investigates the characteristics of robots for non-industrial use such as home robots, when those are used as an interface for accessing information. Although information support is one of important capabilities home robots should have, the merits of accessing information via a robot compared with the access via PC or a mobile phone have yet to be fully explored. This paper focuses on the physical presence of robots, which is supposed to be important for robots to provide users with information. In order to investigate the merits, two experiments with participants are performed in this paper. The main contributions of the paper are the following points. First, it is shown that a robot can effectively attract the participants through movements, even though they pay less attention to it. Second, the possibility of using robot actions for providing additional information about information to be accessed by the participant is also investigated. Finally, the effect of a robot User Interface (UI) prototype on communication among users when providing information to them is also investigated. The obtained results support the significance of information support by home robots, which will be used for designing home robots with information support facility.