Empathy: Interactions with Emotive Robotic Drawers

The role of human-robot interaction is becoming more important as everyday robotic devices begin to permeate into our lives. In this study, we video-prototyped a user's interactions with a set of robotic drawers. The user and robot each displayed one of five emotional states - angry, happy, indifferent, sad, and timid. The results of our study indicated that the participants of our online questionnaire preferred empathetic drawers to neutral ones. They disliked robotic drawers that displayed emotions orthogonal to the user's emotions. This showed the importance of displaying emotions, and empathy in particular, when designing robotic devices that share our living and working spaces.