An Approach to Elicit Human-Understandable Robot Expressions to Support Human-Robot Interaction

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel approach for designing and validating human-understandable non-verbal expressions for robots, enhancing natural human-robot interaction through gesture elicitation and validation.

Contribution

It introduces a two-phase method combining gesture elicitation and validation to create understandable robot expressions, demonstrated on a 6-DoF robotic arm.

Findings

Expressions effectively signal curiosity and interest.

The approach improves human understanding of robot intentions.

Validated with studies involving 16 and 260 participants.

Abstract

Understanding the intentions of robots is essential for natural and seamless human-robot collaboration. Ensuring that robots have means for non-verbal communication is a basis for intuitive and implicit interaction. For this, we contribute an approach to elicit and design human-understandable robot expressions. We outline the approach in the context of non-humanoid robots. We paired human mimicking and enactment with research from gesture elicitation in two phases: first, to elicit expressions, and second, to ensure they are understandable. We present an example application through two studies (N=16 \& N=260) of our approach to elicit expressions for a simple 6-DoF robotic arm. We show that it enabled us to design robot expressions that signal curiosity and interest in getting attention. Our main contribution is an approach to generate and validate understandable expressions for robots, enabling more natural human-robot interaction.