Designing Telepresence Robots to Support Place Attachment

TL;DR

This study investigates how telepresence robots can support place attachment by enabling remote exploration of personally significant places. The authors design a multi-user robot platform with local guides (human or agent) and conduct a field study with 38 alumni to examine usage patterns and experiences, revealing four visitor personas. They show that social participation enhances place attachment and derive design implications for guiding interactions with locals and coordinating multiple remote users. The work offers practical guidelines and contributes to the development of telepresence robots that strengthen connections to meaningful places, informing future research on social, multi-user robotic experiences.

Abstract

People feel attached to places that are meaningful to them, which psychological research calls "place attachment." Place attachment is associated with self-identity, self-continuity, and psychological well-being. Even small cues, including videos, images, sounds, and scents, can facilitate feelings of connection and belonging to a place. Telepresence robots that allow people to see, hear, and interact with a remote place have the potential to establish and maintain a connection with places and support place attachment. In this paper, we explore the design space of robotic telepresence to promote place attachment, including how users might be guided in a remote place and whether they experience the environment individually or with others. We prototyped a telepresence robot that allows one or more remote users to visit a place and be guided by a local human guide or a conversational agent. Participants were 38 university alumni who visited their alma mater via the telepresence robot. Our findings uncovered four distinct user personas in the remote experience and highlighted the need for social participation to enhance place attachment. We generated design implications for future telepresence robot design to support people's connections with places of personal significance.

Figures (4)

• Figure 1: In this paper, we explore the design space of the use of telepresence robots to support place attachment, specifically how robots might accommodate multiple users (A) to remotely experience places that are meaningful to them for a range of scenarios (B).
• Figure 2: Our prototype system. (A) The interface for remote users to view the local environment, control the robot, and interact with the agent guide and other users. (B) The robot with the human guide in the university library. (C) The robot with the agent guide in the lakefront park.
• Figure 3: Results from our quantitative measures, including user's place attachment and sense of self-continuity after the remote experience (Left), level of satisfaction, affective and cognitive engagement (Middle), and perceptions of the robot (Right). Participants reported an overall high level of place attachment and satisfaction of the experience. The sense of self-continuity, affective engagement and cognitive engagement were significantly higher when having the remote experience with the human guide comparing to an agent guide. The perceived robot social agency and user's social presence on the robot were significantly higher in the agent guide conditions. C1: one user with the human guide; C2: one user with the agent guide; C3: two users with the human guide; C4: two users with the agent guide.
• Figure 4: Data from our analysis of dialogue interactions including dialogues between user(s) and guide (Left), user(s) and locals (Middle), and within two remote users (Right). Across all types of dialogue, participants engaged in significantly longer durations of dialogue when visiting with the human guide than visiting with the agent guide.