Effects of Touch Behaviors and Whispering Voices in Robot-Robot Interaction for Information Providing Tasks

Using multiple robots for information providing tasks is one effective approach to attract people by showing conversational interaction between robots. In this study, we investigate the effectiveness of showing such intimate interaction between robots as touching because it has positive effects on human-robot interactions, even though it has received less attention than robot-robot interaction. We prepared touch behaviors and whispering voices between robots and conducted experiments where robots provided information to participants. Our experiment results showed the effectiveness of both touch behaviors and whispering voices between robots in information providing tasks. On the other hands, we also found that whispering voices decreased their likeability, although touch behavior did not have such negative effects.