On Constructing a Communicative Space in HRI

Interaction means to share a communicative space with others. Social interactions are reciprocally-oriented activities among currently present partners. An artificial system can be such a partner for humans. In this study, we investigate the effect of disturbance in humanrobot interaction. Disturbance in communication is an attention shift of a partner caused by an external factor. In human-human interaction, people would cope with the problem to continue to communicate because they presuppose that the partner might get irritated and thereby shift his/her interactive orientation. Our hypothesis is that people reproduce a social attitude of reattracting the partner’s attention by varying their communication channels even toward a robot. We conducted an experiment of hybrid interaction between a human and a robot simulation and analyzed it from a sociological and an engineering perspective. Our qualitative analysis revealed that people established a communicative space with our robot and accepted it as a proactive agent.