Humanoid robots as a passive-social medium: a field experiment at a train station

This paper reports a method that uses humanoid robots as a communication medium. There are many interactive robots under development, but due to their limited perception, their interactivity is still far poorer than that of humans. Our approach in this paper is to limit robots' purpose to a non-interactive medium and to look for a way to attract people's interest in the information that robots convey. We propose using robots as a passive-social medium, in which multiple robots converse with each other. We conducted a field experiment at a train station for eight days to investigate the effects of a passive-social medium.