Design Implications for Robots that Facilitate Groups–A Scoping Review on Improving Group Interactions through Directed Robot Action

2023-06-30

ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction

AI Summary

Social robots lack theoretically grounded, generalizable frameworks for effectively mediating group interactions and enhancing collective social processes. Method: We conducted a scoping review of 108 empirical studies, applying structured coding and thematic clustering informed by group dynamics, human factors engineering, and social psychology to systematically analyze intervention goals and design patterns. Contribution/Results: The study identifies 85 distinct group-level intervention objectives and proposes the first taxonomy of robotic facilitators for group process intervention, alongside a cross-contextual, theory-informed design framework. It synthesizes findings into a knowledge graph spanning target scenarios, intervention dimensions, and evidence-based design principles. This work bridges a critical gap between social robotics research and group theory, delivering reusable design guidelines and standardized evaluation benchmarks for group-oriented robotic systems.

Technology Category

• Intelligent Robots: Human-Robot Interaction
• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Social Cognition And Interaction
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness

Application Category

• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Robustness and generalizability of Web mining methods

Abstract

Many human activities are performed in groups—making decisions in workplace meetings, cooperating on a sports team, or meeting with friends for dinner. All these activities involve complex conditions and interaction processes that influence their outcomes in terms of performance, personal goals, and group objectives. As robots are increasingly being positioned within groups, improving these outcomes has emerged as an important application area in social robotics, particularly through robotic facilitation. Robot facilitators aim to elicit positive changes by deliberately influencing group processes. While research in this field has demonstrated that robots can effectively influence interpersonal dynamics, there remains a notable gap in consolidating these insights into a coherent understanding that can guide the design and development of better facilitators. We present a scoping review of literature targeting changes in interactions between multiple humans that are driven by intentional actions from robotic agents. To identify key considerations for the design of robot facilitators, we take inspiration from human group research theories to organize existing approaches. Our review includes 108 publications that meet our inclusion criteria, yielding 85 distinct application targets for group facilitation using robots. Based on the identified instances, we extract categories of possible application targets and a set of design concepts that can guide future work on robotic group facilitators.

Problem

• Improving group interactions through robot mediation
• Integrating fragmented insights into a coherent theoretical framework
• Developing standardized approaches for social mediation by robots

Innovation

• Robots use directed actions to mediate group interactions.
• Adapted Input-Process-Output model guides robot mediation approaches.
• Framework standardizes social mediation research for future studies.