Abstract
Social robots that are capable of showing affective expressions can improve human-robot interaction and users’ experiences in many ways. This capability is important in many application areas. In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of 11 affective expressions for Miro, an animal-like robot. Affective expressions were inspired by the animal and human behavior literature. The designs were evaluated through a video study on Mechanical Turk with 88 participants. Five of the expressions—happy, sad, excited, surprised, and tired—were correctly recognized by more than half of the participants. While fewer participants were able to recognize the other, more complex affective expressions, we observed a significant correlation between the recognition of the robot’s displayed affective states and participants’ understanding of human emotions. This suggested that the reduced accuracy in the recognition of the other affective expressions can be due to the general challenges involved in recognizing complex emotions.
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Notes
- 1.
This set was decided to include basic emotions, and a few moods (e.g., fearful and tired) that would be beneficial for applications that involve children and older adults (e.g., dementia care, education, therapy, and rehabilitation).
- 2.
This step provided us with more information about why an expression was confused with another one. Due to space limitation, the results of this part are not discussed here.
- 3.
Two other questionnaires were used to gather additional information about the participants’ experiences, which are beyond the scope of this paper and are therefore not discussed here.
- 4.
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Acknowledgment
This research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the Canada 150 Research Chairs Program and the Network for Aging Research at the University of Waterloo. We thank Jesse Hoey, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this work.
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Ghafurian, M., Lakatos, G., Tao, Z., Dautenhahn, K. (2020). Design and Evaluation of Affective Expressions of a Zoomorphic Robot. In: Wagner, A.R., et al. Social Robotics. ICSR 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12483. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-62056-1_1
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