Producing animal-like and friendly impressions on artifacts and analyzing their effect on human behavioral attitudes

The authors propose a methodology on looping psychological interactions between a person and a pet robot. Production of animal-likeness impression toward a person is one of the most important objectives for interactive pet robots. Animal-like impression can have power to effect on human psychological conditions and also human behavior. In this paper, we propose 3 methods to produce animal-likeness on artifacts, namely morphological appearance method, body temperature method, and vital body movement stimulus method. Impressions produced by them are measured in 3 psychological experiments. In addition to producing impressions, the authors measure human behavioral uncertainty quantitatively in order to show the relationship between human behavioral attitudes against a pet robot and what he/she feels about it. These methods for producing impressions and measuring human behavior will be nonverbal I/O technologies for interactive pet robots.