Designing Conversational Human-Robot Collaborations in Silence

In this study, we developed a robot that encourages multi-party human conversations and helps participants to deal with silences. We consider three types of robot behavior, i.e., (1) encouraging talk by specific individuals (the you condition), (2) encouraging talk by all participants (the all-of-you condition), and (3) promoting talk among us (the we condition). We evaluated whether the robot elicits participant’s attitudes of working together toward one purpose by both conversational analysis and a five-point scale question. In this paper, we revealed that the robot elicits participant’s playful, cooperative, and pondering behaviors appropriate to different circumstance in silence and will contribute to design conversation enhance robot’s behaviors that enable participants to break silence and keep conversations going.