Towards engagement models that consider individual factors in HRI: on the relation of extroversion and negative attitude towards robots to gaze and speech during a human-robot assembly task

Estimating the engagement is critical for human– robot interaction. Engagement measures typically rely on the dynamics of the social signals exchanged by the partners, especially speech and gaze. However, the dynamics of these signals are likely to be influenced by individual and social factors, such as personality traits, as it is well documented that they critically influence how twohumans interact with each other. Here, we assess the influence of two factors, namely extroversion and negative attitude toward robots, on speech and gaze during a cooperative task, where a human must physically manipulate a robot to assemble an object. We evaluate if the score of extroversion and negative attitude towards robots co-variate with the duration and frequency of gaze and speech cues. The experiments were carried out with the humanoid robot iCub and N = 56 adult participants. We found that the more people are extrovert, the more and longer they tend to talk with the robot; and the more people have a negative attitude towards robots, the less they will look at the robot face and the more they will look at the B Serena Ivaldi [email protected] 1 Inria, Villers-lès-Nancy, 54600 Nancy, France 2 Loria, CNRS & Université de Lorraine, Loria, UMR n. 7503, Vandoeuvre-lès-Nancy, 54500 Nancy, France 3 Intelligent Autonomous Systems, TU Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany 4 LIP6, Paris, France 5 Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, Stuttgart, Germany 6 CNRS & Sorbonne Universités, UPMC Université Paris 06, Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR) UMR7222, Paris, France 7 CHARt-Lutin, Université Paris 8, Paris, France robot hands where the assembly and the contacts occur. Our results confirm and provide evidence that the engagement models classically used in human–robot interaction should take into account attitudes and personality traits.