The Behavioral Patterns of Neutral Affective State for Service Robot Using Video Ethnography

Abstract

In recent years, a large number of robots have been developed in several countries, and these robots have been built for the purpose to appeal to users by well designed human-robot interaction. In case of the robots developed so far, they show proper reactions only when there is a certain input. On the other hands, they cannot perform in a standby mode which means there is no input. In other words, if a robot does not make any motion in standby mode, users may feel that the robot is being turned-off or even out of work. Especially, the social service robots maintain the standby status after finishing a certain task. In this period of time, if the robots can make human-like behavioral patterns such like a person in help desk, then they are expected to make people feels that they are alive and is more likely to interact with them. It is said that even if there is no interaction with others or the environment, people normally reacts to internal or external stimuli which are created by themselves such as moving their eyes or bodies. In order to create robotic behavioral patterns for standby mode, we analyze the actual facial expression and behavior from people who are in neutral affective emotion based on ethnographic methodology and apply extracted characteristics to our robots. Moreover, by using the robots which can show those series of expression and action, our research needs to find that people can feel like they are alive.