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Programming Robots to Express Emotions: Interaction Paradigms, Communication Modalities, and Context

Robots are beginning to be used in many fields, including health care, assistive industries, and entertainment. However, we believe that the usefulness of robots will remain limited until end-users without technology expertise can easily program them. For example, the wide range of situations in which robots must express emotions as well as the differences in people with whom robots interact require that emotional expressions be highly customized. Thus, end users should have the ability to create their own robot behaviors to express emotions in the specific situations and environments in which their robots operate. In this paper, we study the ability of novice users to program robots to express emotions using off-the-shelf programming interfaces and methods for Nao and Pleo robots. Via a series of user studies, we show that novice participants created nonverbal expressions with similar characteristics to those identified by experts. However, overall, the emotions expressed through these nonverbal expressions were not easily discerned by others. Verbal expressions were more discernible, although substantial room for improvement was observed. Results also indicate, but do not definitively show, that procedural mechanisms can improve users' abilities to create good verbal expressions.