Perception matters! Engagement in task orientated social robotics

Engagement in task orientated social robotics is a complex phenomenon, consisting of both task and social elements. Previous work in this area tends to focus on these aspects in isolation without consideration for the positive or negative effects one might cause the other. We explore both, in an attempt to understand how engagement with the task might effect the social relationship with the robot, and vice versa. In this paper, we describe the analysis of participant self-report data collected during an exploratory pilot study used to evaluate users' “perception of engagement”. We discuss how the results of our analysis suggest that ultimately, it was the users' own perception of the robots' characteristics such as friendliness, helpfulness and attentiveness which led to sustained engagement with both the task and robot.