Investigating the Effects of Gaze Behavior on the Perceived Delay of a Robot’s Response

Abstract

Slow responses of social robots cause user frustration in human-robot communication. This paper investigates how far the gaze behavior of a robot, meaning the way the robot looks at its conversation partner, influences the perceived delay of a robot’s response in human-robot conversations. To enhance a natural conversation pattern, a gaze behavior was designed and implemented into a humanoid robot. A within-subject experiment involving 31 test subjects was designed with two conditions (with and without gaze behavior). The results generally show a positive correlation between the gaze behavior that the robot exhibits and the perceived responsiveness of the robot (in the condition with gaze behavior). However, the perceived responsiveness is the same in both conditions. One reason for this finding may be that the response time of the robot might have been generally too short to identify an effect in the experimental setting. Future research can directly build on our research to assess the relation between gaze behavior and perceived responsiveness in further detail and draw upon the finding that gaze behavior generally plays an important role with regard to the perceived responsiveness of a robot. Robot designers can also build on our research and consider both gaze behavior and additional factors to address a perceived delay in a robot’s response.