Telepresence Robot's Salutations to Trigger Informal Conversation with Teleworkers.

Surveys show that teleworkers tend to feel isolated due to the lack of informal communication. To solve this problem, we propose a telepresence robot system that triggers informal communication. Drawing on Kendon's finding of greeting structure prior to interaction, we propose a system that presents two salutations, distance salutation and close salutation. Our experiment with a prototype system suggests that the proposed method is effective in inducing informal communication over the distance.