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Article published In:
Vocal Interactivity in-and-between Humans, Animals and Robots
Edited by Mohamed Chetouani, Elodie F. Briefer, Angela Dassow, Ricard Marxer, Roger K. Moore, Nicolas Obin and Dan Stowell
[Interaction Studies 24:1] 2023
► pp. 131–168

From vocal prosody to movement prosody, from HRI to understanding humans

ORCID logo | Univ. Grenoble Alpes
| Univ. Grenoble Alpes
| Univ. Grenoble Alpes

Human–Human and Human–Robot Interaction are known to be influenced by a variety of modalities and parameters. Nevertheless, it remains a challenge to anticipate how a given mobile robot’s navigation and appearance will impact how it is perceived by humans. Drawing a parallel with vocal prosody, we introduce the notion of movement prosody, which encompasses spatio-temporal and appearance dimensions which are involved in a person’s perceptual experience of interacting with a mobile robot. We design a novel robot motion corpus, encompassing variables related to the kinematics, gaze, and appearance of the robot, which we hypothesize are involved in movement prosody. Initial results of three perception experiments suggest that these variables have significant influences on participants’ perceptions of robot socio-affects and physical attributes.

Keywords: corpus, HRI, prosody of movement
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related works
    • 2.1Exploring the variables of social navigation
    • 2.2Evaluating perceptions of robot socio-affects
    • 2.3Interactions between HRI modalities
    • 2.4Robot motion and video corpus
  • 3.Robot motion corpus design
    • 3.1Velocity profile design
      • 3.1.1Motion sequences
      • 3.1.2Kinematic types
      • 3.1.3Profile variants
    • 3.2Beyond velocity: Robot appearance and body dynamics
      • 3.2.1Frail or robust robot
      • 3.2.2Eye shape and head movements
      • 3.2.3Audio recording
    • 3.3Summary of corpus variables
  • 4.Video corpus acquisition
    • 4.1Robot movement consistency and framing
    • 4.2Environment characteristics
    • 4.3Camera configuration and parameters
  • 5.Perception experiments
    • 5.1First online experiment: Likert scale
      • 5.1.1Likert scale results
      • 5.1.2Likert scale analysis
    • 5.2Second online experiment: Binary choice
      • 5.2.1Binary choice results
      • 5.2.2Binary choice analysis
    • 5.3Embodied experiment
      • 5.3.1Embodied experiment results
      • 5.3.2Embodied experiment analysis
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Limitations
    • 6.2Implications
    • 6.3Future work
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 28 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/is.22010.sca
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