Studying People's Emotional Responses to Robot's Movements

With a deeper interaction between robots and humans, the emotional rapport between the two is becoming ever more important. The interpretation of emotion expressed by robots has been widely studied with humanoids and animal-like robots, which try to mimic biological beings similar to those people is used to interact with. Considering the uncanny valley issue and the practical and theoretical questions related to implement bio-inspired robots, it may be argued whether also object-like robots can express emotions so that people can satisfactorily interact with robots that can have functional shapes, not necessarily bio-insipired. This paper presents some study cases done to identify body features that allow emotion projection from an object-like robot body. The study was done in two phases: a pilot experiment, and a formal trial. The results show that is possible to project different emotions by exploiting angular and linear velocity of the robot.