The Art of Designing Robot Faces – Dimensions for Human-robot Interaction 1.2 Designing Robots for Users

As robots enter everyday life and start to interact with ordinary people the question of their appearance becomes increasingly important. A user's perception of a robot can be strongly influenced by its facial appearance. Synthesizing relevant ideas from narrative art design, the psychology of face recognition, and recent HRI studies into robot faces, we discuss effects of the uncanny valley and the use of iconicity and its effect on the self/other perceptive divide, as well as abstractness and realism, classifying existing designs along these dimensions. The dimensions and issues of face design are illustrated in the design rationale, details of construction and intended uses of a new minimal expressive robot called KASPAR. It is an exciting time in robotics. Personal service robots, so long the science fiction dream, are becoming reality and are for sale to general consumers. Currently their uses (and users) are limited, but capabilities are improving, costs are coming down and sales are growing. In addition robots are finding a new place in society as toys, artificial pets [29], security guards, teachers [18], tour guides [35] and in search and rescue [11]. They are finding use in areas as diverse as autism therapy [32, 33], space exploration [1] and research into cognition and biological systems [34]. 1.1 RobotCub One such research project that we are involved in at Hert-fordshire is RobotCub, a 5-year multinational project to build a humanoid child-size robot for use in embodied cogni-tive development research [34]. The RobotCub consortium consists of 11 core partners from Europe with collaborators in America and Japan, and the institutions involved are each working on specific areas of the robot design, engineering , developmental psychology and human-robot interaction. The project software and hardware plans will be Human Robot Interaction '06 Salt Lake City, Utah USA published under open-source licenses, with the aim of creating a community using a common platform for robotic and cognitive research. Robots are becoming available in a wide variety of roles. A recent report by the UN Economic Commission for Europe and the International Federation of Robotics predicts that 4.1 million robots will be working in homes by the end of 2007 [36]. The implication is that, as they crawl, roll and walk out of the laboratory and into the 'real' world, that people in the real world will be using them-families, soldiers , nurses, teachers. These users will more than likely not have a …