Back to the museum: Investigation of the acceptance of Android Andrea with and without emotion simulation in a museum

2026-07-17

AI Summary

This study investigates the impact of different emotion simulation mechanisms on visitors’ subjective acceptance of a humanoid robot deployed in a real-world museum setting. Over six days, the humanoid robot Andrea autonomously engaged visitors in multilingual dialogues at a public museum in Germany under three conditions: no emotion, ChatGPT-driven emotion, and the WASABI dedicated affective architecture. This work presents the first systematic field evaluation comparing large language model–based and specialized emotion frameworks in human–robot interaction, with data analyzed using an extended TAM2 questionnaire. Results indicate that neither emotion mechanism significantly improved users’ subjective evaluations, and participants did not consciously perceive the robot’s emotional expressions, thereby challenging the prevailing assumption that emotion simulation inherently enhances user acceptance.

Abstract

For a second time, the android robot Andrea was set up at a public museum in Germany for six consecutive days to have conversations with visitors, fully autonomously. Building on previously gathered qualitative results, the robot was now capable of engaging in multi-lingual conversation with the visitors about the museum context. The robot was prepared with context information about the museum in general and its surrounding exhibits this time. The robot featured a slightly artificial sounding voice that was previously evaluated as congruent with its gender-ambiguous but very humanlike design. Three experimental conditions were implemented, in which either (1) the robot simulated no emotions, (2) the robots emotions were determined by ChatGPT 4.1, or (3) the WASABI emotion simulation architecture simulated the robot's emotion dynamics. An extended version of the TAM2 questionnaire was employed to let 73 visitors report on several factors of their opinion about the android robot Andrea after having experienced it. In result, the statistical analysis suggests that these first two approaches to implementing emotions into the chat architecture of our android robot Andrea did not yield any positive effects on the subjective evaluations by the visitors and were not detectable on a conscious level.

Problem

• android robot
• emotion simulation
• museum interaction
• user acceptance
• human-robot interaction

Innovation

• emotion simulation
• humanoid robot
• ChatGPT integration
• WASABI architecture
• technology acceptance