J. K. Lee, C. Breazeal

Abstract

This study explores how people’s social response toward a humanoid robot can change when we vary the number of the active degrees of freedom in the robot’s head and face area. We investigate this problem by conducting two wizard-of-oz user studies that situate an elder person in a self-disclosure dialogue with a remotely operated robot. In our first study, we investigated the effect of expressive head gestures with a four-degree-of-freedom neck. In the second study we focused on the face where we investigated the effect of expressive eyebrow movement versus active gaze and eyelid movement. In the first study, we found that participants are willing to disclose more to the robot when the robot moved its neck in an expressive manner. In the second study, our data suggests a trend where gaze and expressive eyelid movement results in more disclosure over eyebrow movement