The Effect of Communication Approaches on Intimacy in Human-Humanoid Robot Interaction

Social robots are widely applied in various contexts to provide human-like assistance and facilitate service experience. Prior research considered a variety of design features to explore the influences in human-robot relationships, while a robot's manner of assisting in interaction and its consequent effects are rarely discussed. This study aims to investigate the relationship between a robot's communication design and a human's perceived intimacy in the human-humanoid robot interaction. Different levels of service proactivity (proactive vs. reactive) and types of expressive behaviors (neutral vs. intimate) are developed and empirically validated through an online survey. The findings indicate that the manipulations designed for each experimental condition can be recognized by the participants. In addition, the perception of intimacy is significantly affected when interacting with different robots accompanying different types of behaviors.