Something in The Way It Moves and Beeps

Abstract

Minimal movements coupled with semantic free utterances could represent a solution for non-anthropomorphic robots to meaningfully communicate during child-robot interaction (cHRI). The research presented in this paper explores minimal nonverbal behavior to supply non-anthropomorphic robots with the communicative power necessary to engage as 'cooperative peers' in playful tasks with children. Preliminary results from a video prototyping study show that minimal robot movements communicate social engagement and referential information in a task and positively affect children's perception of animacy, likeability, and helpfulness of the robot. Results from an exploratory study in-situ show potential benefits of coupling movements with a type of semantic free utterances (i.e., gibberish speech) to positively affect cooperative task performance and shape children's cooperation.