Having Different Dialog Roles in Telecommunication by Using Two Teleoperated Robots Reduces an Operator’s Guilt

In recent years, applications of social robots as the operator’s avatar have been widely studied for remote conversation with rich nonverbal information. Having another side-participant robot beside the avatar robot of the operator was found to be effective for providing long-lasting backchannels to the interlocutor. The side-participant robot is also expected to play a role in assisting human participation in multiparty conversations. However, such a focus has not been applied to remote conversations with multiple robots. Here, we propose a multiple-robot telecommunication system with which the operator can use a side-participant robot to assist conversation that is developed by the operator through the main speaker robot to verify its effectiveness. In the laboratory experiment where the subjects were made to feel stressed by being forced to provide rude questions to the interlocutor, the proposed system was shown to reduce guilt and to improve the overall mood of operators. The result encourages the application of a multi robot remote conversation system to allow the user to participate in remote conversations with less anxiety of potential failure in maintaining the conversation.