Could Socially Interactive Architectural Robotics Promote Restorative Environments?

In a pandemic or post-pandemic world, numerous environments can be stress-inducing for individuals. Hospitals, for instance, can trigger anxiety in patients who feel a sense of helplessness over their health conditions. Similarly, home offices, where people spend extended hours meeting deadlines in isolation, can also contribute to mounting mental pressure. The situation may further deteriorate in the foreseeable future, given the widely accepted work-from-home norm that leads to a rise in social isolation. Could social robotics play a positive role in transforming these stressful places into cheerful and restorative places? In this paper, we investigated how people’s perceived restorativeness (i.e., how restorative an environment is perceived by its inhabitants) can be shaped by socially interactive robotic flowers embedded in the interior spaces as interior decorations. As a means of simulating the interior environment, we utilized virtual reality (VR) to incorporate socially expressive virtual flowers, enabling people to interact with them. Through in-lab studies, we invited 35 participants to experience this virtual space, both with and without the socially interactive flowers. Our findings revealed that the presence of these interactive flowers significantly enhanced participants’ perception of restorativeness within the interior environment. While previous research in Social Robotics and HRI has primarily focused on people’s perception of social robots, there has been limited exploration into how social robots, when integrated into an architectural space, can influence inhabitants’ perceptions of that particular environment. We believe this can be a novel and promising research direction for the social robotics and HRI communities.