Interactions with a moody robot

Abstract

This paper reports on the results of a long-term experiment in which a social robot's facial expressions were changed to reflect different moods. While the facial changes in each condition were not extremely different, they still altered how people interacted with the robot. On days when many visitors were present, average interactions with the robot were longer when the robot displayed either a "happy" or a "sad" expression instead of a neutral face, but the opposite was true for low-visitor days. The implications of these findings for human-robot social interaction are discussed.