Wizard of Oz vs autonomous: Children's perception changes according to robot's operation condition

The presence of robots in human lifestyle is no longer a distant reality, as robots are being employed in several fields, including educational purposes. However, most of the research in educational robotics does not use autonomous social behavior, but rather techniques like Wizard of Oz (WoZ). This paper presents the very first test in a school environment of a robotic architecture to control an autonomous system for educational interactions, evaluated from user's perspective when compared to a teleoperated situation. The architecture aims to manage three main communication robot resources — speech, vision and gesture — in an autonomous way and provide an interaction as acceptable as when someone controls the robot. The experiment was performed randomly assigning 82 students aged between 7 and 11 to interact with a NAO robot in two conditions of robot operation: autonomous and teleoperated. The results suggest that there is no significant difference between the conditions in user's enjoyment and system time response, but they decreased their perception regarding robot's intelligence after knowing about the teleoperation.