A Survey on Robotic Vacuum Cleaners: Evaluation of Expressive Robotic Motions based on the Framework of Laban Effort Features for Robot Personality Design

Abstract

The adoption of robotic vacuum cleaners (RVCs) has drastically increased. During interaction with these embodied autonomous agents, humans tend to ascribe certain personality traits to them even when the robot has a mechanoid appearance and low degree of freedom. As the social capabilities and the persuasiveness of robots increase, the design of robot personality will become important. This paper investigates the impact of expressive motions on people’s perception of robot personality. The framework of Laban Effort Features was implemented for a simple cleaning task. Movement features were programmed in iRobot Create2, and participants were asked to rate the robot’s personality in an online survey. The results indicated that Flow factor was closely associated with neuroticism ratings, Weight factor impacted both agreeableness and conscientiousness ratings, while Time factor impacted only the agreeableness ratings. Movement characteristics should be considered when designing personality into domestic service robots like RVCs, which are expected to operate in highly social settings.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Agnihotri Chan

Hedaoo

Knight

(2020). Distinguishing Robot Personality from Motion. Companion of the 2020 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 87–89. https://doi.org/10.1145/3371382.3378389

Anova Test (n.d.). R Documentation. Retrieved February 20, 2022, from https://www.rdocumentation.org/packages/rstatix/versions/0.7.0/topics/anova_test

Bennett

(2021, August 27). This is why your Roomba’s random patterns actuallt make perfect sense. Cnet News. https://www.cnet.com/home/kitchen-and-household/this-is-why-yourroombas-random-patterns-actually-make-perfect-sense/

Bernardet

Fdili Alaousi

Studd

Bradley

Pasquier

Schiphorst

(2019). Assessing the reliability of the Laban Movement Analysis system. PLoS ONE, 14(6), 1-23. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0218179

Carpinella

C. M.

Wyman

A. B.

Perez

M. A.

Stroessner

S. J.

(2017). The Robotic Social Attributes Scale (RoSAS): Development and Validation. Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI ‘17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 254–262. https://doi.org/10.1145/2909824.3020208

Celiktutan Gunes

(2015). Computational analysis of human-robot interactions through first-person vision: Personality and interaction experience. 24th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 815–820. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2015.7333602

Donnellan

Oswald

Baird

Lucas

(2006). The Mini-IPIP Scales: Tiny-yet-Effective Measures of the Big Five Factors of Personality. Psychological assessment. 18. 192-203. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.18.2.192

Emir

Burns

C.M.

(2022, August 28-September 2). Evaluation of Expressive Motions based on the Framework of Laban Effort Features for Social Attributes of Robots [Paper presentation]. Accepted for presentation at the 31^st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication, Naples, Italy.

(2019). Personality Facets, Writing Strategy Use, and Writing Performance of College Students Learning English as a Foreign Language. SAGE Open, 9(3), 215824401986148–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244019861483

10.

Howell

D. C.

(2010) Statistical Methods for Psychology (7^th ed.). Belmont, CA: Cengage Learning.

11.

Knight

Simmons

(2014). Expressive Motion with X, Y and Theta: Laban Effort Features for Mobile Robots. The 23^rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 267-273. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926264

12.

Knight

Simmons

(2016a). Laban head-motions convey robot state: A call for robot body language. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2881-2888. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA.2016.7487451

13.

Knight

Thielstrom

Simmons

(2016b). Expressive path shape (swagger): simple features that illustrate a robot’s attitude toward its goal in real time. 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems (IROS), 1475-1482. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2016.7759240

14.

Laban

(1948). Modern Educational Dance. MacDonald & Evans.

15.

Lavrakas

P. J.

(2008). Encyclopedia of survey research methods (Vols. 1-0). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412963947

16.

Ninomiya

Fujita

Suzuki

Umemuro

(2015). Development of the multi-dimensional robot attitude scale: Constructs of people’s attitudes towards domestic robots. International Conference on Social Robotics, 482-491. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_48

17.

Robert

L.P.

Alahmad

Esterwood

Kim

You

Zhang

(2020), A Review of Personality in Human–Robot Interactions. Foundations and Trends® in Information Systems, 4(2), 107–212. https://doi.org/10.1561/2900000018

18.

Rydell

R. J.

McConnell

A. R.

Beilock

S. L.

(2009). Multiple Social Identities and Stereotype Threat: Imbalance, Accessibility, and Working Memory. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96(5), 949–966. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014846

19.

Santamaria

Nathan-Roberts

(2017). Personality Measurement and Design in Human-Robot Interaction: A Systematic and Critical Review. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 61(1), 853–857. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541931213601686

20.

Sharma

Hildebrandt

Newman

Young

Eskicioglu

(2013). Communicating affect via flight path: exploring use of the laban effort system for designing affective locomotion paths. Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, 293–300. https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2013.6483602

21.

Sonlu

Güdükbay

Durupinar

(2021). A Conversational Agent Framework with Multi-modal Personality Expression. ACM Transactions on Graphics, 40(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3439795

22.

Tapus

Ţăpuş

Matarić

M. J.

(2008). User-robot personality matching and assistive robot behavior adaptation for post-stroke rehabilitation therapy. Intelligent Service Robotics, 1(2), 169-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11370-008-0017-4

23.

Walchko

(2020, April 28). Pycreate2 0.8.0. Python Package Index. https://pypi.org/project/pycreate2/

24.

Wonseok (Eric) Young Woo

Yeonheung

(2021). Who made the decisions: Human or robot umpires? The effects of anthropomorphism on perceptions toward robot umpires. Telematics and Informatics, 64, 101695–. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2021.101695