| In recent years, there has been an increasing interest in designing social robots to interact with people, for providing therapy and companionship. Most social robots currently being used are light-weight and much smaller in size compared to people. In this work, we want to investigate designing interactions for larger and non-humanoid robots as they have more potential of physically assisting people. A modified version of Baxter robot was used, by sitting Baxter on top of an electronic wheelchair. Two experiments were designed for studying the role of facial expressions and body movements in expressing attitude. Because the robot's body shape is quite different from a person, in the first experiment, we tested whether the body language for the robot to express attitudes is similar to that of humans'. In the second experiment, we further examined the usage of facial expression, social dialogue and gesture to make people feel more comfortable to interact with the robot. Our results indicate that our robot is capable of expressing fine and distinguishable attitudes using its body language, and body language plays a more important role than facial expressions in this process. |
