Designing Non-Verbal Humorous Gestures for a Non-Humanoid Robot

Abstract

Humor has various positive implications for our daily lives, and it has shown to improve human-robot interaction as well. To date, humor has been applied to robots that mimic human behavior thus missing out on improving interactions with the non-humanoid robots continually being deployed to our daily lives. In this work, we conducted an initial evaluation of the far-out possibility to create non-verbal humorous behavior for a robot with no human features. The robot’s humorous gestures were designed by a clown therapist, animator, and HRI expert. The initial evaluation compared participants’ responses to humorous and non-humorous robotic gestures. Our study indicates it is possible for a simple non-humanoid robot to communicate a humorous experience through gestures alone, provided the movements are carefully balanced to bring about this good humor encounter. This study’s gesture design insights can serve as first steps toward leveraging humorous behaviors in non-humanoid robots to enhance HRI.