Animal-Inspired Peripheral Interaction: Evaluating a Dog-Tail Interface for Communicating Robotic States

Abstract

Animals use emotions for communicating how they feel, e.g., cats arch their back and dogs show their teeth when angry. We believe that allowing robots to communicate using animal-inspired interfaces (e.g., wagging a tail) will help people understand robots’ states in terms of affect (e.g., happy, sad, etc.), serving as a clear peripheral awareness channel. This understanding can help people decide when and how to interact with a robot. For example, by ap-pearing scared, a robot can suggest that it needs help. As an investigation of our work, we built a robotic dog-tail prototype and conducted a user study to ex-plore how various parameters of tail movement (e.g., speed) influence people's perception of affect. The results from this study indicated that people interpret tail motions in consistent terms of valence and arousal. We formed an initial set of design guidelines from the results, and further conducted a design workshop by inviting people working as interaction-designers to design tail motions for various states of robots working in different scenarios (e.g., search and rescue), using our design guidelines. Finally, in this paper, we briefly discuss the user study we conducted, present our initial set of guidelines, discuss the steps we took for testing them, and how we improved them so that they can be readily used by HRI designers to convey affective states of their robots.

Video

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Citation

Ashish Singh, James E. Young. Animal-Inspired Peripheral Interaction: Evaluating a Dog-Tail Interface for Communicating Robotic States. In proceedings of the Workshop on Peripheral Interaction: Embedding HCI in Everyday Life at the 14th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-Computer Interaction - INTERACT'13, 33-38.

Bibtext Entry

@inproceedings{Singh2013,
author = {Singh, Ashish and Young, James E.},
title = {Animal-Inspired Peripheral Interaction: Evaluating a Dog-Tail Interface for Communicating Robotic States},
booktitle = {Peripheral Interaction: Embedding HCI in Everyday Life},
series = {Workshop, INTERACT '13},
year = {2013},
location = {Cape Town, South Africa},
}