Haptic Intelligence

Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve: Users Prefer Robots with Emotional Reactions to Touch and Ambient Moods

2023

Conference Paper

hi

Robots are increasingly being developed as assistants for household, education, therapy, and care settings. Such robots can use adaptive emotional behavior to communicate warmly and effectively with their users and to encourage interest in extended interactions. However, autonomous physical robots often lack a dynamic internal emotional state, instead displaying brief, fixed emotion routines to promote specific user interactions. Furthermore, despite the importance of social touch in human communication, most commercially available robots have limited touch sensing, if any at all. We propose that users' perceptions of a social robotic system will improve when the robot provides emotional responses on both shorter and longer time scales (reactions and moods), based on touch inputs from the user. We evaluated this proposal through an online study in which 51 diverse participants watched nine randomly ordered videos (a three-by-three full-factorial design) of the koala-like robot HERA being touched by a human. Users provided the highest ratings in terms of agency, ambient activity, enjoyability, and touch perceptivity for scenarios in which HERA showed emotional reactions and either neutral or emotional moods in response to social touch gestures. Furthermore, we summarize key qualitative findings about users' preferences for reaction timing, the ability of robot mood to show persisting memory, and perception of neutral behaviors as a curious or self-aware robot.

Author(s): Rachael Bevill Burns and Fayokemi Ojo and Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
Book Title: Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
Pages: 1914--1921
Year: 2023
Month: August
Department(s): Haptic Intelligence
Research Project(s): Haptic Empathetic Robot Animal (HERA)
Bibtex Type: Conference Paper (inproceedings)
Paper Type: Conference
DOI: 10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309358
Address: Busan, South Korea
State: Published
URL: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372992516_Wear_Your_Heart_on_Your_Sleeve_Users_Prefer_Robots_with_Emotional_Reactions_to_Touch_and_Ambient_Moods

BibTex 

@inproceedings{Burns23-ROMAN-Heart,
  title = {Wear Your Heart on Your Sleeve: Users Prefer Robots with Emotional Reactions to Touch and Ambient Moods},
  author = {Burns, Rachael Bevill and Ojo, Fayokemi and Kuchenbecker, Katherine J.},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)},
  pages = {1914--1921},
  address = {Busan, South Korea},
  month = aug,
  year = {2023},
  doi = {10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309358},
  url = {https://www.researchgate.net/publication/372992516_Wear_Your_Heart_on_Your_Sleeve_Users_Prefer_Robots_with_Emotional_Reactions_to_Touch_and_Ambient_Moods},
  month_numeric = {8}
}