Designing Expressive Lights and In-Situ Motions for Robots to Express Emotions

In this paper, we explore how a utility robot might express emotions via expressive lights and in-situ motions. In most previous work, methods for either modality were investigated alone, leaving a huge potential to improve the expression of emotions by combining the two modalities. We present a series of three studies, one for investigating how well people might recognize emotions on the basis of expressive light cues alone, one for exploring how people might perceive affect towards in-situ motion characteristics, and one for further combining the two modalities and studying whether multi-modal expressions could be better recognized by people. Results from the first study show participants were not able to recognize target emotions with high accuracy. Results from the second suggest a relationship between the in-situ motion characteristics of a robot and perceived affect. Results from the third suggest that expressions that combine in-situ motions with expressive lights were better able to convey many emotions but not all. We conclude that adding in-situ motions to affective expressive lights appears to be better able to help convey emotions. These findings are important for designing affective behaviors for future utility robots that need to possess certain social abilities.