Assisting Group Discussions Using Desktop Robot Haru

Socially assistive robots are potentially to be integrated with human daily lives in the near future, and expected to be able to improve group dynamics when interacting with groups of people in social settings. In this paper, we developed a system with desktop robot Haru to assist group discussions. The system consists of three modules: a dialogue assistance module which facilitates Haru to speak to users and answer questions in a free way; a dialogue balance module to encourage participation of users in the discussion with verbal behaviors; an autonomous gazing behavior module trained via deep reinforcement learning in simulation and deployed on physical Haru in reality, which can show politeness during group discussion, e.g., gazing to the speaking member, looking to the middle when both members are talking or silent, looking at the least spoken person when encouraging her. Results of user study with 40 subjects show the significant effectiveness of our system in assisting group discussion.