  In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in
physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual
intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other
approaches they are used as motivational aids. These are two "paradigms", so to
speak, within the small but growing area of robots for social exercise. We
designed an online questionnaire to test whether the preferred role in which
people want to see robots would be the companion or the coach. The
questionnaire asks people to imagine working out with a robot with the help of
three utilized questionnaires: (1) CART-Q which is used for judging
coach-athlete relationships, (2) the mind perception questionnaire and (3) the
System Usability Scale (SUS). We present the methodology, some preliminary
results as well as our intended future work on personal robots for coaching.
