Design of Taking a Walk with a Robot that Receives Care from a Person and Indirectly Mediates Communication with Strangers

We report the results of our study on whether taking a walk with a child-like robot that a person takes care of can generate interaction with the surrounding people whom the person has never met before. As the number of single-person households increases, it is expected that more people will live with not only robots that can be useful for people but also robots that people can take care of. Our study is important because we explored the possibilities of such a robot to create interaction between people in the community, which has been lost in recent years. In this paper, we designed the behavior of a robot that follows a person and learns about the scenery while walking together and implemented it using Pepper. Then, the first author walked around the university building with the robot and observed the initial reactions of the surrounding people. As we expected, the surrounding people interacted with the first author by talking to the robot as if it were a child and helping the robot. This paper contributes to taking a step forward a new research theme ‘taking a walk with a robot and a person’ by focusing on the important role of robots in the future relationship with a person: care-receiving from a person and communication mediation between a person and others.