A Telepresence Robot Partner for Remote Work: An Exploration into Design and Its Psychological Effect

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly shifted the traditional workspace to the domestic environment. Social isolation inspires us to consider telepresence technologies to reshape our working experience. This study is inspired by the psychological concept of social facilitation and explores its implementation in telepresence robots. A telepresence robot representing somebody with minimal cues was designed and tested in our experiment on a puzzle task. We suspect a facilitative effect of the robot on the participants’ work efficiency and self-efficacy through its social presence. To evaluate the design, different modalities of the “observer” were set up as different experiment conditions. The initial result shows no significant social facilitation effect. However, this study contributes to the ongoing debate on the effectiveness of robots in remote work environments.