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Designing and Assessing Expressive Open-Source Faces for the Baxter Robot

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Social Robotics (ICSR 2016)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 9979))

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Abstract

Facial expressions of both humans and robots are known to communicate important social cues to human observers. Nevertheless, faces for use on the flat panel display screens of physical multi-degree-of-freedom robots have not been exhaustively studied. While surveying owners of the Rethink Robotics Baxter Research Robot to establish their interest, we designed a set of 49 Baxter faces, including seven colors (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and gray) and seven expressions (afraid, angry, disgusted, happy, neutral, sad, and surprised). Online study participants (N = 568) drawn equally from two countries (US and India) then rated photographs of a physical Baxter robot displaying randomized subsets of the faces. Face color, facial expression, and onlooker country of origin all significantly affected the perceived pleasantness and energeticness of the robot, as well as the onlooker’s feelings of safety and pleasedness, with facial expression causing the largest effects. The designed faces are available to researchers online.

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Acknowledgments

The first author was supported by a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship under Grant No. DGE-0822 and an NSF Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship under Grant No. 0966142. We thank Chris Callison-Burch and Eileen Huang for their advice.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Haptics Group, GRASP Laboratory, Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 19104, USA

    Naomi T. Fitter & Katherine J. Kuchenbecker

Authors
  1. Naomi T. Fitter
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  2. Katherine J. Kuchenbecker
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Naomi T. Fitter .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering, The University of Kansas, Lawrence, Indiana, USA

    Arvin Agah

  2. Department of Mechanical Engineering, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar

    John-John Cabibihan

  3. School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

    Ayanna M. Howard

  4. Department of Systems Engineering and Automation, University Carlos III de Madrid, madrid, Spain

    Miguel A. Salichs

  5. Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, USA

    Hongsheng He

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Fitter, N.T., Kuchenbecker, K.J. (2016). Designing and Assessing Expressive Open-Source Faces for the Baxter Robot. In: Agah, A., Cabibihan, JJ., Howard, A., Salichs, M., He, H. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9979. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_33

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47437-3_33

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-47436-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-47437-3

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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