Effectiveness of Body Gesture Expression for Behavior Inducing

Abstract

To investigate how gestures a robot expressed affect people’s acceptance of the encouragement or requests from the robot, experiments where a robot showed different expressions have been conducted. Acceptance tendencies were analyzed from questionnaires and biosensors, including heartbeat and brain waves, in this paper. With the increasing needs of robots in daily life, the situations that robots induce humans to take actions and perform tasks collaboratively must be considered in studies of human–robot interaction. A multi-modal expression that includes utterance content and nonverbal information is crucial to promote the acceptance of inducement and request. Therefore, this study focuses on the gesture, an important nonverbal expression, and has investigated the effects on humans. The experiment compared the three conditions; M-condition (gestures that match the emotion of the speech content), R-condition (gestures that are opposite to the emotion of the speech content), and N-condition (no gesture). The result showed that the people in M-condition and R-conditions were more likely than the N-condition to accept robot requests and feel relaxing after the robot asking.