Towards Metrics of Evaluation of Pepper Robot as a Social Companion for the Elderly

For the design of socially acceptable robots, field studies in Human-Robot Interaction are necessary. Constructing dialogue benchmarks can have a meaning only if researchers take into account the evaluation of robot, human, and their interaction. This paper describes a study aiming at finding an objective evaluation procedure of the dialogue with a social robot. The goal is to build an empathic robot (JOKER project) and it focuses on elderly people, the end-users expected by ROMEO2 project. The authors carried out three experimental sessions. The first time, the robot was NAO, and it was with a Wizard of Oz (emotions were entered manually by experimenters as inputs to the program). The other times, the robot was Pepper, and it was totally autonomous (automatic detection of emotions and decision according to). Each interaction involved various scenarios dealing with emotion recognition, humor, negotiation and cultural quiz. The paper details the system functioning, the scenarios and the evaluation of the experiments.