Impression of a Caregiving Task by Communicating the Robot’s Motion State through Robots Conversation

Lifecare robots often have different forms from people, such as wheelchairs and robot arms. It becomes difficult for users to understand the motion state of such robots, and such difficulties have become a factor of giving a mental burden. For a robot to communicate its motion state to users, we propose a method of indirect communication with which a robot communicates its motion state to a user through a conversation with another robot. In this paper, we investigate whether the proposed method decreases the burden on users receiving care from a robot. Our experimental results suggest that our proposed method increases the likeability to a robot system; however, the results also suggest that our method does not have an influence on the impressions of a caregiving task.