Robot's face change what we feel!?
At the conference known as “ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction in 2018” held in Chicago, the United States in March, a research group at the University of Washington presented a paper that investigated incredibly 157 robots’ face! By examining each robot’s face, they revealed several intriguing facts, for example, approximately one-third robots had a black-themed face, human’s type of eyes were adopted only for 10 % robots, while round-shaped eyes were the most popular for robots.
Furthermore, the researchers found out that people unconsciously change their feeling towards robots (e.g. trustworthiness, witness, reliability) when parts of a robot’s face such as a nose and ears were added/removed to/from a robot.
Based on these research results, the research group expected that the effect of robots can be increased. For instance, they assumed that if a security robot would remove its mouth, the robot would seem to be more reliable. Now that robots are prevailing in our society, let’s get out of a home, look at robot’s faces and predict what the robots are for!!
University of Washington, ”Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces,” HRI 2018 in Chicago, Alisa Kalegina et al.