From vocal prosody to movement prosody, from HRI to understanding humans

Abstract

Human–Human and Human–Robot Interaction are known to be influenced by a variety of modalities and parameters. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to anticipate how a given mobile robot’s navigation and appearance will impact how it is perceived by humans. Drawing a parallel with vocal prosody, we introduce the notion of movement prosody, which encompasses spatio-temporal and appearance dimensions which are involved in a person’s perceptual experience of interacting with a mobile robot. We design a novel robot motion corpus, encompassing variables related to the kinematics, gaze, and appearance of the robot, which we hypothesize are involved in movement prosody. Initial results of three perception experiments suggest that these variables have significant influences on participants’ perceptions of robot socio-affects and physical attributes.

Planning Socially Expressive Mobile Robot Trajectories

“…Our model of human perception was derived from the analysis of experimental data from our online study and in-person studies presented in our prior work [ 30 ]. The results show that accelerations, velocities, and timing have significant impacts on the social perception of our mobile robot.…”

“…The scales were chosen based on words that participants in prior HRI studies had used to self-annotate their own recorded interaction data after a long experiment with a small butler robot [26,27]. For more details about the choice of the adjectives in our scales, we refer the reader to [30]. During the experiment, each participant rated 45 different videos each showing a unique combination of the corpus variable values along the 10 binary perceptual scales.…”

“…[ 28 ] observed that the changes in a participant’s vocal prosody over the course of an interaction with a robot were aligned with changes in their spatial behavior, gaze, and voice quality [ 29 ]. We hypothesize that a robot’s navigation movement prosody (i.e., subtle differences in it’s style of navigation [ 30 ]) may play a role in how people perceive different social attitudes. This is different to existing works that study naturalness and comfort [ 10 ] or the expression of emotions or intent through motion [ 7 ].…”

“…In this section, we discuss our method for modeling how different variations in a mobile robot’s motion and appearance influence people’s social and physical perception of the robot. In our prior work [ 30 ], we designed a robot motion corpus that consists of motion and appearance variables, which are combined to define many different styles of motion. The corpus was used to conduct perception experiments by asking participants to rate their perception of a mobile robot by viewing videos of it performing motions from the corpus.…”

“…The scales were chosen based on words that participants in prior HRI studies had used to self-annotate their own recorded interaction data after a long experiment with a small butler robot [ 26 , 27 ]. For more details about the choice of the adjectives in our scales, we refer the reader to [ 30 ].…”