Socio-expressive Robot Navigation: How Motion Profiles can convey Frailty and Confidence

• Published in: 2022 10th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction Workshops and Demos (ACIIW) pp. 1 - 8
• Main Authors: Scales, Philip, Auberge, Veronique, Aycard, Olivier
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 18.10.2022
• Subjects: Affective computing; autonomous robot navigation; Conferences; frail robot for care; Heuristic algorithms; Navigation; perception of robot intention; perception of robot personality; Prediction algorithms; Robot motion; socio-affective mobility profiles; socio-expressive navigation; Task analysis
• DOI: 10.1109/ACIIW57231.2022.10086013

Human-aware navigation and Social Navigation are growing fields of robotics, attempting to tackle challenging navigation problems in human environments. The physical tasks themselves are difficult to handle algorithmically due to their dynamic nature and the difficulty to predict human behaviour. The challenge of this work is to show that in addition to the practical aspects of navigation, the manner in which a robot navigates - analogous to speech and gesture prosody - conveys fine cues which are strongly perceived as expressive behaviours. In a prior work, primitive types of navigation profiles were defined, and combined with minimal cues of appearance to create an audio-visual corpus of robot motion. In this work, we show through online and in-person perception experiments that some of these profiles are significantly associated to impressionistic values related to robot intentions and personality. These socio-affective values have an influence on care according to prior works involving people considered as frail, in particular exploring the idea of frail robots for tender care. Initial results show in particular that using saccadic or smooth motion can impact people's perceptions of whether the robot inspires confidence or not, seems frail or sturdy, authoritative or polite, aggressive or gentle, confident or doubtful, and nice or disagreeable.