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C. Tsiourti, A. Weiss, K. Wac, M. Vincze:
"Designing Emotionally Expressive Robots: A Comparative Study on the Perception of Communication Modalities";
Talk: 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction, Bielefeld; 10-17-2017 - 10-20-2017; in: "5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction", (2017), 10 pages.

Socially assistive agents, be it virtual avatars or robots, used in domestic, entertainment and health care application domains need to engage in social interactions with naïve human users and express their internal emotional states, goals, and desires. Endowing agents with a humanoid embodiment that supports natural communication modalities, such as the face, body, or voice, can make a significant difference in how users perceive and interact with them. In this work, we conduct a comparative study to investigate how humans perceive emotional cues expressed by humanoid robots through five communication modalities (face, head, body, voice, locomotion) and examine whether the degree of a robot´s human-like embodiment affects this perception. In an online survey, we asked people (N=170) to identify emotions communicated by the highly human-like Pepper and Hobbit with four degrees-of-freedom (DoF). A qualitative and quantitative data analysis confirmed the expressive power of the face, but also demonstrated that body expressions or even simple head and locomotion movements of a robot with limited DoF could convey emotional information. These findings suggest that emotion recognition accuracy varies as a function of the modality, but a higher degree of anthropomorphism does not necessarily lead to a higher level of recognition accuracy. Our results further the understanding of how people respond to single communication modalities and have implications for designing recognizable multimodal expressions for robots.

HAI; HRI; Emotional Expression; Multi-Modal Interaction, Facial Expression, Body Motion, Social Robots.