Distinguishing Robot Personality from Motion

Abstract

The central research question of this work is can robot motioneffectively communicate distinct robot personalities? In this study,we implemented three distinct robot motion personalities inspiredby a subset of the seven dwarfs: Happy, Sleepy, and Grumpy. Weimplemented autonomous motion generation systems that mappedeach personality to path shape, timing, and seeking/avoidance ofthe participant features. A user study demonstrated that our 24participants could distinguish these personalities. Robot motionstyle predicted robot personality features such as politeness, friend-liness, and intelligence, which, for the most part, matched logicallyto the intended dwarf personality designs. These results indicatethat robot motion style is sufficient to indicate a robot's personalityduring its interactive behaviors with people.