Tabulation and Analysis of Questionnaire Results of Subjective Evaluation of Seal Robot in Seven Countries

This paper describes research on a "mental commitment robot". These robots have a different target audience to industrial robots, one that is not so rigidly dependent on objective measures such as accuracy and speed. The main goal of this research is to explore a new area in robotics, with the emphasis on human-robot interaction. In previous research, we classified robots into four categories, which related to their appearance. We then introduced a robot cat and a robot seal, which we evaluated by interviewing a large group of people. The results showed that physical interaction improved their subjective evaluation of the robots. Moreover, a priori knowledge of a subject has a considerable influence on the subjective interpretation and evaluation of mental commitment robots. In this paper, we asked several groups of subjects to evaluate the seal robot known as 'Paro' by answering questionnaires that were given out in exhibitions that were held in seven different countries; Japan, U.K., Sweden, Italy, Korea, Brunei and U.S. This paper reports the results of statistical analysis of the evaluation data.