Recent research indicates that other factors in addition to appearance may contribute to the “Uncanny Valley” effect, and it is possible that “uncanny actions” such as “robot telepathy” - the nonverbal exchange of information among multiple robots - could be one such factor. We thus specifically examine whether humans are negatively affected by displays of nonverbal robot-robot communication through a disaster relief scenario in which one robot must relay information from a human participant to another robot in order to successfully complete a task. Our results showed no significant difference between the verbal and nonverbal communication strategies, thus suggesting that “telepathic information transmission” is acceptable. However, we also found several unexplained robot-specific effects, prompting future follow-up studies to determine their causes and the extent to which these effects might impact human perception and acceptance of robot communication strategies.
@inproceedings{williamsetal14roman,
title={Is Robot Telepathy Acceptable? Investigating Effects of Nonverbal Robot-Robot Communication on Human-Robot Interaction},
author={Tom Williams and Priscilla Briggs and Nathaniel Pelz and Matthias Scheutz},
year={2014},
booktitle={Proceedings of 23rd IEEE Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)},
url={https://hrilab.tufts.edu/publications/williamsetal14roman.pdf}
doi={10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926365}
}