Emotionally Expressive Robot Behavior Improves Human-Robot Collaboration

In order to improve human-robot collaboration, it is necessary to consider how robots may be able to act in a way that is understandable to the people with whom they are working. This paper presents a preliminary experimental human-robot collaboration study with 10 human subjects. The paper analyzes the effect of a robot’s emotionally expressive non-verbal behavior on human-robot teamwork. The study was modeled and performed in the immersive simulator SIGVerse. The findings of the study reveal that embodied emotional expressiveness improves the integration of human-robot activity. The results of the study show that embodied expressiveness increases the duration of the activities that have a positive value for the collaborative task. The embodied expressiveness also has a significant influence on the distance between human-robot collaborators.