Are You Embarrassed?: The Impact of Robot Types on Emotional Engagement with a Robot

The objective of this study is to examine the effect of robot types on emotional communication between a person and a robot. We executed a 2 (robot types: an autonomous robot vs. a tele-operated robot) within-participants experiment (N=36). Participants were interviewed with either autonomous robot interviewers or tele-operated robot interviewers, and asked how much they felt social presence of robot interviewers and embarrassment toward robot interviewers. Participants felt more social presence to tele-operated robots than autonomous robots. Moreover, participants felt more embarrassment when they were interviewed with tele-operated robots than autonomous robots.