Subjective Evaluation of Seal Robot at the Japan Cultural Institute in Rome

This paper describes research on mental commit robot that seeks a different direction from industrial robot, and that is not so rigidly dependent on objective measures such as accuracy and speed. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with an emphasis on human-robot interaction. Mental commit robots provide psychological, physiological, and social effects to human beings through physical interaction. In the previous research, we categorized robots into four categories in terms of appearance. Then, we introduced a cat robot and a seal robot, and evaluated them by interviewing many people. The results showed that physical interaction improved subjective evaluation. Moreover, a priori knowledge of a subject has much influence into subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commit robot. In this paper, 95 subjects evaluated the seal robot, Paro by questionnaires in an exhibition at the Japan cultural institute in Rome, Italy for 4 days from June 25th to 28th, 2003. This paper reports the results of statistical analysis of evaluation data.