(e)motion: Exploring the Affect of Abstract Motion in Human-Robot Interaction

In this paper we present our exploration of the emotional impact robot motion has on humans. We argue and attempt to justify the exploration of a fundamental layer of physical motion, trying to understand how it is being interpreted by observers. We discuss our design philosophy, attempting to create an abstract robotic platform, formless and affordances-less, and to examine it in an exploratory fashion; allowing participants to reflect on the motion they experience in various open ended ways. We argue that through our observations we could be able to achieve insight into how different robotic motions map to emotion, insight that could have implications for design well beyond abstract robotic interfaces. The paper discusses our early prototype efforts and their design critique evaluation. It then follows by presenting our final prototype and an extensive user study we performed using it; attempting to understand whether and how basic robot movements, conveyed via an abstract robotic platform, can elicit emotional reactions and engagement in users. We detail and discuss our findings and their significance to the domain of social human-robot interaction design. ACM Classification