Development of the sociability of non-anthropomorphic robot home companions

The aim of our research is to develop socially acceptable behaviours for non-anthropomorphic robot home companions acting as personal assistants. We describe an exploratory study to investigate how simple movements influence perceptions of the sociability of such robots. In order to improve development time of human-robot interaction studies we develop and analyse an online-video survey. Methodological issues of this approach are discussed and investigated in a pilot and a validation study. Results show that even simple yet consistent movements mimicking social behaviours created a positive perception of robots sociability in the user. If participants can perceive adequately different robot social behaviours in a video survey, we argue that this effect will be greater in a real face-to-face interaction study.