Avoiding the uncanny valley: robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion

This articleii presents the results of video-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials which investigated people’s perceptions of different robot appearances and associated attention-seeking features and behaviors displayed by robots with different appearance and behaviors. The HRI trials studied the participants’ preferences for various features of robot appearance and behavior, as well as their personality attributions towards the robots compared to their own personalities. Overall, participants tended to prefer robots with more human-like appearance and attributes. However, systematic individual differences in the dynamic appearance ratings are not consistent with a universal effect. Introverts and participants with lower emotional stability tended to prefer the mechanical looking appearance to a greater degree than other participants. It is also shown that it is possible to rate individual elements of a particular robot’s behavior and then assess the contribution, or otherwise, of that element to the overall perception of the robot by people. Relating participants’ dynamic appearance ratings of individual robots to independent static appearance ratings provided evidence that could be taken to support a portion of the left hand side of Mori’s theoretically proposed ‘uncanny valley’ diagram. Suggestions for future work are outlined. I.INTRODUCTION Robots that are currently commercially available for use in a domestic environment and which have human interaction features are often orientated towards toy or entertainment functions. In the future, a robot companion which is to find a more generally useful place within a human oriented domestic environment, and thus sharing a private home with a person or family, must satisfy two main criteria (Dautenhahn et al. (2005); Syrdal et al. (2006); Woods et al. (2007)): It must be able to perform a range of useful tasks or functions. It must carry out these tasks or functions in a manner that is socially acceptable and comfortable for people it shares the environment with and/or it interacts with. The technical challenges in getting a robot to perform useful tasks are extremely difficult, and many researchers are currently researching into the technical capabilities that will be required to perform useful functions in a human centered environment including navigation, manipulation, vision, speech, sensing, safety, system integration and planning. The second criteria is arguably equally important, because if the robot does not exhibit socially acceptable behavior, then people may reject the robot if it is annoying, irritating, unsettling or frightening to human users.  How can a robot behave in a socially acceptable manner? Research into social robots is generally contained within the rapidly developing field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). For an overview of socially interactive robots (robots designed to interact with humans in a social way) see Fong et al. (2003). Relevant examples of studies and investigations into human reactions to robots include: Goetz et al. (2003) where issues of robot appearance, behavior and task domains were investigated, and Severinson-Eklundh et al. (2003) which documents a longitudinal HRI trial investigating the human perspective of using a robotic assistant over several weeks . Khan (1998), Scopelliti et al. (2004) and Dautenhahn et al. (2005) have surveyed peoples’ views of domestic robots in order to aid the development of an initial design specification for domestic or servant robots. Kanda et al. (2004) presents results from a longitudinal HRI trial with a robot as a social partner and peer tutor aiding children learning English.