The uncanny valley has become synonymous with the uneasy feeling of viewing an animated character or robot that looks imperfectly human. Although previous uncanny valley experiments have focused on relations among a character's visual elements, the current experiment examines whether a mismatch in the human realism of a character's face and voice causes it to be evaluated as eerie. The results support this hypothesis.

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Natural human-like human-robot interaction (NHL-HRI) requires the robot to be skilled both at recognizing and producing many subtle human behaviors, often taken for granted by humans. We suggest a rough division of these requirements for NHL-HRI into three classes of properties: (1) social behaviors, (2) goal-oriented cognition, and (3) robust intelligence, and present the novel DIARC architecture for complex affective robots for human-robot interaction, which aims to meet some of those requirements. We briefly describe the functional properties of DIARC and its implementation in our ADE system. Then we report results from human subject evaluations in the laboratory as well as our experiences with the robot running ADE at the 2005 AAAI Robot Competition in the Open Interaction Event and Robot Exhibition.

Recognizing and responding to human affect is important in collaborative tasks in joint human-robot teams. In this paper we present an integrated affect and cognition architecture for HRI and report results from an experiment with this architecture that shows that expressing affect and responding to human affect with affect expressions can significantly improve team performance in a joint human-robot task.

In speed skating, the amount of work per stroke is dependent on the component of the push-off force in the direction perpendicular to the gliding direction of the skate. One stroke consists of a gliding phase and a push-off phase in which the knee is explosively extended. Film and video analysis showed that the better skaters show a higher power production and no differences in stroke frequency. Differences in performance are related to differences in push-off mechanics. The faster skaters reach a higher angular velocity at the knee; the time during which the knee is extended is shorter. At the start of the push-off, the velocity of the body center of gravity in the horizontal direction is higher due to a passive falling movement in the frontal plane. It is concluded that the better skaters show a better timing that results in a more explosive and effective directed push-off.