Improving Human-Robot Collaboration Efficiency and Robustness through Non-Verbal Emotional Communication

Abstract

Emotional expression plays a very important role in human-robot interaction. It can greatly improve the quality of interaction between humans and robots. In the case of non-verbal communication, emotional expression can greatly shorten the social distance between humans and robots. However, in practical HRI applications, the efficiency and robustness are also an important part we need to consider. In this paper, we demonstrate the impact on the efficiency and robustness of human-robot teamwork in the case of implicit non-verbal communication. We designed an interactive experiment using a collaborative Sawyer robot. In the experiment, we let the robot play a tic-tac-toe game with a person, and judged whether there was a positive or negative effect by comparing the effects of various emotional factors. Our experiments demonstrated that the emotional expression in the case of non-verbal communication has a positive impact on the efficiency and robustness in a collaborative human-robot task.