  A key challenge in developing engaging social robots is creating convincing,
autonomous and responsive agents, which users perceive, and treat, as social
beings. As a part of the collaborative project: Expressive Agents for Symbiotic
Education and Learning (EASEL), this study examines the impact of autonomous
response to children's speech, by the humanoid robot Zeno, on their
interactions with it as a social entity. Results indicate that robot autonomy
and adult assistance during HRI can substantially influence children's
behaviour during interaction and their affect after. Children working with a
fully-autonomous, responsive robot demonstrated greater physical activity
following robot instruction than those working with a less responsive robot,
which required adult assistance to interact with. During dialogue with the
robot, children working with the fully-autonomous robot also looked towards the
robot in anticipation of its vocalisations on more occasions. In contrast, a
less responsive robot, requiring adult assistance to interact with, led to
greater self-report positive affect and more occasions of children looking to
the robot in response to its vocalisations. We discuss the broader implications
of these findings in terms of anthropomorphism of social robots and in relation
to the overall project strategy to further the understanding of how
interactions with social robots could lead to task-appropriate symbiotic
relationships.
