Let’s Negotiate with Jennifer! Towards a Speech-Based Human-Robot Negotiation

Abstract

Social robots are increasingly integrated into society, necessitating their interaction with humans to fulfill tasks. Negotiation stands as an essential process for these robots to engage in, enabling joint decision-making with human counterparts when conflicting interests arise. This paper introduces a novel approach for a humanoid robot to negotiate effectively with humans through speech. The research proposes a speech-based negotiation protocol where agents make offers in a turn-taking manner via speech. A variant of a time-based concession bidding strategy is presented for the humanoid robot, and its performance was evaluated against human counterparts in human-robot negotiation experiments.