In recent years, applications of social robots as the operator’s avatar have been widely studied for remote conversation with rich nonverbal information. Having another side-participant robot beside the avatar robot of the operator was found to be effective for providing long-lasting backchannels to the interlocutor. The side-participant robot is also expected to play a role in assisting human participation in multiparty conversations. However, such a focus has not been applied to remote conversations with multiple robots. Here, we propose a multiple-robot telecommunication system with which the operator can use a side-participant robot to assist conversation that is developed by the operator through the main speaker robot to verify its effectiveness. In the laboratory experiment where the subjects were made to feel stressed by being forced to provide rude questions to the interlocutor, the proposed system was shown to reduce guilt and to improve the overall mood of operators. The result encourages the application of a multi robot remote conversation system to allow the user to participate in remote conversations with less anxiety of potential failure in maintaining the conversation.

近年来，社交机器人作为操作员化身的应用已被广泛研究，用于具有丰富非语言信息的远程对话。人们发现，在操作员的化身机器人旁边放置另一个侧面参与机器人，可以有效地为对话者提供持久的后台通道。侧面参与机器人也有望在协助人类参与多方对话方面发挥作用。然而，这样的关注点尚未应用于与多个机器人的远程对话。在这里，我们提出了一种多机器人电信系统，操作员可以使用侧参与机器人来协助操作员通过主扬声器机器人开发的对话，以验证其有效性。在实验室实验中，受试者因被迫向对话者提出​​粗鲁的问题而感到压力，结果表明，所提出的系统可以减少内疚感并改善操作员的整体情绪。结果鼓励了多机器人远程对话系统的应用，以允许用户参与远程对话，而不必担心维持对话的潜在失败。