Singing the Body Electric: The Impact of Robot Embodiment on User Expectations
This work addresses the challenge for robotics researchers and designers in understanding how users form pre-interaction conceptualizations, which can inform interaction and physical design for socially interactive robots, though it is incremental in applying existing methods to this domain.
The study tackled the problem of predicting user expectations about robots' social and physical capabilities based on their physical design, showing that multimodal features of robot embodiments can provide generalizable information about mental models across socially interactive robots.
Users develop mental models of robots to conceptualize what kind of interactions they can have with those robots. The conceptualizations are often formed before interactions with the robot and are based only on observing the robot's physical design. As a result, understanding conceptualizations formed from physical design is necessary to understand how users intend to interact with the robot. We propose to use multimodal features of robot embodiments to predict what kinds of expectations users will have about a given robot's social and physical capabilities. We show that using such features provides information about general mental models of the robots that generalize across socially interactive robots. We describe how these models can be incorporated into interaction design and physical design for researchers working with socially interactive robots.