Exploring the Affect of Emotive Motion in Social Human Robot Interaction

Motion can be a powerful channel of expression and as robots begin to take on increasingly personal roles in our daily lives, we propose that their inherent motion capabilities will become an important method for us to be able to communicate and interact with them in socially intuitive and easily understandable ways. In this thesis, we explore this concept of emotive motion as a design tool for social Human-Robot Interaction research: we leverage the ways in which the low-level style and characteristics of how robots move (e.g. slowly, smoothly, sporadically, etc.) affects our social and emotional interpretations of them.;We present a new conceptual taxonomy to frame our exploration of emotive motion, discuss a set of exploratory prototype robotic platforms we designed and a pair of in-depth user studies we conducted in order to better understand how the many facets of motion affects humans' emotional interpretations of social robotic agents. Our work demonstrates the powerful impact of emotive motion as a design tool in social HRI, shedding light on its interplay with other design considerations such as a robot's visual form and working context.