Screen feedback: How to overcome the expressive limitations of a social robot

Abstract

It is the aim of this work to research how short-comings of a social robot due to its expressive limitations may be overcome by multimodal feedback. An experiment is proposed in which a robot that cannot produce facial expressions plays a game of rock, paper, scissors with people. A screen which is built-in the torso of the robot is used to compensate for these limitations in expressiveness and provide the participant with facial expressions during the game. To assess the impact of the screen on the user's rating of the robot and the interaction as such, there will be a control condition in which the screen will stay turned off. With this experiment we would like to show that sophisticated feedback setup can contribute to make a playful interaction between a human and a robot even more enjoyable.