Perception of Robot Smiles and Dimensions for Human-Robot Interaction Design

As robots enter everyday life and start to interact with ordinary people the question of their appearance becomes increasingly important. Our perception of a robot can be strongly influenced by its facial appearance. Synthesizing relevant ideas from narrative art design, the psychology of face recognition, and recent HRI studies into robot faces, we discuss effects of the uncanny valley and the use of iconicity and its relationship to the self-other perceptive divide, as well as abstractness and realism, classifying existing designs along these dimensions. A new expressive HRI research robot called KASPAR is introduced and the results of a preliminary study on human perceptions of robot expressions are discussed