Effect of Synchronized Remote Sender’s and Robot’s Motion Cues on Presence in Telerobotics

As a telepresence robot is a robot intended for use in telecommunications, conveying the presence of a remote sender is an important issue. Even though certain characteristics of robots such as motion cues could be effective at generating a sense of remote sender presence, motion cues also have risks yielding a distortion of the remote sender presence when these are used in an inappropriate way. Thus, in order to find effective ways to increase the remote sender presence, we executed an experiment comparing a telepresence robot with synchronized motion cues which provides synchronized motion with remote sender’s motion and a robot with unsynchornized motion cues which provides independent motion and unsynchronized with remote sender’s motion (N=48). Participants engaged in a video call with a remote sender through a telepresence robot having synchronized motion cues or unsynchronized motion cues. The results showed that participants felt more co-presence and social presence of a remote sender when interacting with a telepresence robot with synchronized motion cues than they did with the one with unsynchronized motion cues. The implications for the design of telepresence robots in terms of increasing presence are discussed in detail.