Investigating social acceptance of infant feeding support robots

2018 Fiscal Year Final Research Report

• Project/Area Number: 16K12505
• Research Category: Grant-in-Aid for Challenging Exploratory Research
• Allocation Type: Multi-year Fund
• Research Field: Intelligent robotics
• Research Institution: Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International
• Principal Investigator: Shiomi Masahiro 株式会社国際電気通信基礎技術研究所, 知能ロボティクス研究所, 室長 (90455577)
• Project Period (FY): 2016-04-01 – 2019-03-31
• Keywords: 保育支援ロボット

Outline of Final Research Achievements

We developed a prototype of a feeding support robot and investigated the perceived feelings from adult participants. The experiment results showed that showing conversation between a social robot and an arm robot significantly increased the perceived likability more than only using the arm robot for a feeding support. Moreover, we investigate social acceptance for an infant feeding support robot by comparing different appearance via WEB-based questionnaires; the results showed that the human-like appearance is more acceptable than arm-like appearance for an infant feeding support.

Free Research Field

ヒューマンロボットインタラクション

Academic Significance and Societal Importance of the Research Achievements

本研究を通じて，人々の生活支援を行うロボットが自身の社会的受容性を高めるために，人のような外観を用いるだけではなく，ロボット同士の会話を見せることが有用であることが示された．会話を見せる行為は必ずしもタスクの達成に必要なものではないが，人間は社会的な振る舞いを見せる存在に対してより高い受容性を示すことを示しており，今後人々と関わりあうロボットの振る舞い設計において有用な知見を得ることができた．