Would you help a sad robot? Influence of robots’ emotional expressions on human-multi-robot collaboration

With recent advancements in robotics and artificial intelligence, human-robot collaboration has drawn growing interests. In human collaboration, emotion can serve as an evaluation of events and as a communicative cue for people to express and perceive each other’s internal states. Thus, we are motivated to investigate the influence of robots’ emotional expressions on human-robot collaboration. In particular, we conducted experiments in which a participant interacted with two Cozmo robots in a collaborative game. We found that when the robots exhibited emotional expressions, participants were more likely to collaborate with them and achieved task success in shorter time. Moreover, participants perceived emotional robots more positively and reported to have a more enjoyable experience interacting with them. Our study provides insights on the benefit of incorporating artificial emotions in robots on human-robot collaboration and interaction.