Evaluation of a Humanoid Robot’s Emotional Gestures for Transparent Interaction

Abstract

Effective and successful interactions between robots and people are possible only when they both are able to infer the other’s intentions, beliefs, and goals. In particular, robots’ mental models need to be transparent to be accepted by people and facilitate the collaborations between the involved parties. In this study, we focus on investigating how to create legible emotional robots’ behaviours to be used to make their decision-making process more transparent to people. In particular, we used emotions to express the robot’s internal status and feedback during an interactive learning process. We involved 28 participants in an online study where they rated the robot’s behaviours, designed in terms of colours, icons, movements and gestures, according to the perceived intention and emotions.