Studying people's emotional responses to robot's movements in a small scene

Studies about human interaction have shown that subtle changes in movement performance and body posture may improve people's acceptance in social groups. The same applies also to robots. However, most of the work has been done on faces and bio-inspired or humanoid robots, while still few works have focused on generic robot body movement to produce interesting interaction settings, which include emotion projection. These studies have to take into account the restrictions and peculiarities of robots, like degrees of freedom, or a body shape designed to achieve a specific functionality - such as, for instance, vacuum cleaning - and not necessarily bio-inspired. This work reports the results obtained from two experiments performed to study whether features different from face and bio-inspired bodies could convey emotions. The study has been done with a non-bio-inspired robot base, having an intentionally unusual (for a robot) shape. The results show that it is possible to convey emotions using features that can be implemented also in a non-bio-inspired embodiment.