Daedalus: A sUAV for Social Environments

Due to their wide functionality in military and civil applications, small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) are becoming more commonly operated in public places, causing direct and indirect human-robot interaction. As these particular robots promise widespread integration into humans' social contexts, it is important to understand how people will perceive them if positive interaction wants to be achieved. In this video, we introduce a sUAV for social environments. “Daedalus” is a quadcopter that has been designed with a special focus in expressing emotional states through interaction features, such as head movements and eye color variation. In order to analyze the robot's capacity to express emotions and people's perception of these states, an experiment was conducted. The sUAV is initially located in a stationary module, the subject approaches the robot, and sits down in front of it, maintaining an interaction distance between 0.5 - 0.7 m. The robot performs 4 different expressions combining head movement and eye color display. After each expression, a psychologist asks the subject two questions: What do you feel? and What do you think the robot is feeling? For evaluation, subjects must select one of seven cards associated with basic emotions to express and evaluate emotions according to the questions. The preliminary results of this experiment are presented in this video.