Kensuke Kato

Measurement of Anxiety toward Robots

To study the short-term and long-term influence of communication robots in daily life applications, it is necessary to develop psychological scales for measuring the mental states of users of robots and analyzing related social trends. In particular, to explore the more internal factors related to communication robots, it is necessary to focus on anxiety. This paper reports the results of developing the Robot Anxiety Scale (RAS) for measuring the anxiety that prevents individuals from interaction with robots having functions of communication in daily life. In particular, we focus on communication in a human-robot dyad

Influences of concerns toward emotional interaction into social acceptability of robots

It is widely believed that there will be social robots in the future working in our daily life, and researchers have started to study human-robot interaction. It seems that ordinary people in many industrialized countries are waiting for such robots; Japan is believed to be one such country. Researchers in robotics have already started to develop various technologies toward such robots. Meanwhile, researchers wonder what kind of robots might be accepted. One intuitive dimension is concerned with immediate acceptance, including field trials, observational studies for a real use-case with robots in our daily lives, and marketing surveys asking people about functions and prices of a possible product. Moreover, laboratory studies with a real robot in a use-case scenario of a near future can contribute to predicting human behaviors in facing robots which not yet exist.

What People Assume about Robots: Cross-Cultural Analysis between Japan, Korea, and the USA

Tatsuya Nomura1,3, Tomohiro Suzuki2, Takayuki Kanda3, Jeonghye Han4, Namin Shin5, Jennifer Burke6 and Kensuke Kato7 1 Ryukoku University, 2 JSPS Research Fellow and Toyo University, 3 ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories, 4 Cheongju National University of Education, 5 Dongguk University, 6 University of South Florida, 7 Kyushu University of Health and Welfare 1, 2, 3,7Japan, 4, 5Korea, 6 USA