Identifying emotions from facial expression displays of robots - results from a survey study

For humans and robots to share space and cooperate, communication is essential. In the communication between a human and a robot it is important for the machine to understand the human but also for the human to understand the information conveyed by the robot. This requires, that the robot would be able to convey its intent to humans in an understandable way. The aim of this article is to evaluate different approaches to communicate the intent of a machine. A survey study was conducted to analyze the understanding of pseudo-emotional states and other status expressions of a robot. The study of 171 responses revealed that participants are less likely to correctly interpret the emotions and/or status of a machine if only robot’s eyes are used to express the emotions and system status.