Hi,

colleagues of mine compiled some interaction guidelines for mobile service robots for last year's IEEE ARSO (Backhaus et al. 2018). Unfortunately, IEEE Xplore still needs to put the proceedings online. I put the reference below, nonetheless.

EDIT: Finally their work is available in IEEE Xplore. Hope this helps!

>>> https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8625721

For a general purpose dialogue design I would recommend implementing polite speech (see e.g. Srinivasan & Takayama 2016, Castro-González et al. 2016, Salem et al. 2014). Avoid violating social norms, as this reduces trust (see e.g. Mirnig et al. 2017).

If you can narrow down your robot's target audience (age, education, etc.) you can better fit the sweet spot between politeness and performance, as being more polite tends to generate significantly longer texts and in turn takes more time to speak out.

If you want to look at dialogue also from a non-verbal point of view, I recommend looking into proxemics (e.g. Kato et al. 2015), lights (e.g. Baraka & Veloso), and emotions / facial expressions (e.g. Beer et al. 2015). Emotions can also be transported with spoken dialogue, but is harder to implement the more synthetic the robot's voice is.

I hope this helps with finding some entry points into the literature.

Kind regards and good luck with your research,

Martin

Literature

Backhaus, N., Rosen, P., Scheidig, A., Gross, H.-M., & Wischniewski, S. (2018). “Somebody help me, please?!” Interaction design framework for needy mobile service robots. Paper presented at the IEEE Workshop on Advanced Robotics and its Social Impacts (ARSO) 2018, Genoa, Italy.

Baraka, K., & Veloso, M. M. (2018). Mobile Service Robot State Revealing Through Expressive Lights: Formalism, Design, and Evaluation. International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(1), 65-92.

Beer, J. M., Smarr, C.-A., Fisk, A. D., & Rogers, W. A. (2015). Younger and older users׳ recognition of virtual agent facial expressions. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 75, 1-20.

Castro-González, Á., Castillo, J. C., Alonso-Martín, F., Olortegui-Ortega, O. V., González-Pacheco, V., Malfaz, M., & Salichs, M. A. (2016). The Effects of an Impolite vs. a Polite Robot Playing Rock-Paper-Scissors. Paper presented at the International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR), Kansas City, MO.

Kato, Y., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2015a). May I help you? Design of Human-like Polite Approaching Behavior. Paper presented at the Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, Portland, OR.

Mirnig, N., Stollnberger, G., Miksch, M., Stadler, S., Giuliani, M., & Tscheligi, M. (2017). To err is robot: How humans assess and act toward an erroneous social robot. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 4, 21.

Salem, M., Ziadee, M., & Sakr, M. (2014). Marhaba, how may I help you?: Effects of politeness and culture on robot acceptance and anthropomorphization. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction.

Srinivasan, V., & Takayama, L. (2016). Help me please: Robot politeness strategies for soliciting help from humans. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems.

Dear Martin Westhoven,

Thank you for taking extra time to put this useful information. I will definitely look into that soon :)

With kind regards,

Tahir