Robot-specific social cues in emotional body language

Abstract

Humans use very sophisticated ways of bodily emotion expression combining facial expressions, sound, gestures and full body posture. Like others, we want to apply these aspects of human communication to ease the interaction between robots and users. In doing so we believe there is a need to consider what abstraction of human social communicative behaviors is appropriate for robots. The study reported in this paper is a pilot study to not offer simulated emotion but to offer an abstracted robot version of emotion expressions and an evaluation to what extent users interpret these robot expressions as the intended emotional states. To this end, we present the mobile, mildly humanized robot Daryl, for which we created six motion sequences that combine human-like, animal-like, and robot-specific social cues. The results of a user study (N=29) show that despite the absence of facial expressions and articulated extremities, subjects' interpretation of Daryl's emotional states were congruent with the abstracted emotion display. These results demonstrate that abstract displays of emotion that combine human-like, animal-like, and robot-specific modalities could in fact be an alternative to complex facial expressions and will feed into ongoing work identifying robot-specific social cues.

A robot with style, because you are worth it!

“…In order to express the variation of dominance, we used different parameters [6,12,[15][16][17], which deal with speed to stroke, amplitude, blinking, body openness, etc. in order to drive the attitude of virtual agents or robots.…”

Beyond R2D2

“…This concept is not new to the field of Human-Robot Interaction. For example, Embgen et al [23], Bretan, Hoffman, and Weinberg [10], and Cha, Matarić, and Fong [13] already proposed to use abstracted robot-specific behavior consisting of body movement and displaying colored lights, to show a robot's emotion and intentions. Szafir, Mutlu, and Fong explored the design of "natural" and "intuitive" flight motions to improve assistive free-flying robots' abilities to communicate intent while simultaneously accomplishing tasks [71].…”

Robots Showing Emotions

“…Moreover, the implemented emotions vary among works, with a tendency to include happiness. Questionnaires to assess people's perception are often adopted in works that use anthropomorphic platforms (Beck, Hiolle, et al, 2010;Beck, Cañamero, & Bard, 2010;Li & Chignell, 2011;Destephe, Zecca, Hashimoto, & Takanishi, 2013;Embgen et al, 2012;Brown & Howard, 2014). A relevant exception is the work done by Lakatos and collaborators (Lakatos et al, 2014) who assessed the participant's perception based on interaction through a play.…”

“…A second approach is to ask some subjects to design the movements (Li & Chignell, 2011). The last approach is the empirical approach, where researches come with poses and movements based on their own experience (Beck, Hiolle, et al, 2010;Beck, Cañamero, & Bard, 2010;Embgen et al, 2012;Brown & Howard, 2014). One major finding from diverse works (Beck, Hiolle, et al, 2010;Beck, Cañamero, & Bard, 2010;Brown & Howard, 2014) is that moving the head up improved the identification of pride, happiness, and excitement.…”

“…On the other hand, the works that use platforms with no resemblance to persons or animals could be sub-divided in three groups. A first group study the possibility to convey emotions with their platforms (Embgen et al, 2012;Novikova & Watts, 2015;Barakova & Lourens, 2010). The second group focus on determining the contribution of different features in the perception of emotions (Saerbeck & Bartneck, 2010;Hiah et al, 2013;Sharma et al, 2013;Nam, Lee, Park, & Suk, 2014).…”