Influences of changing clothes color of communication robot on information transmission to listener

Abstract

In recent years, communication robots are commonly used in various places and situations such as guidance work at hotels and stations and elderly supports for the purpose of reducing human loads and releasing from simple works. However, it is also shown that people still have a sense of anxiety toward robots. For this reason, there are few people who have motivations to communicate with robots. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the emotion expression of robots contributes to create a sense of familiarity and smooth communication. Therefore, we propose a method of emotion expression and enhancement by changing the color of the clothes the robot is wearing. Also, we have clarified the matching between the clothes colors and 10 emotions (joy, anger, sorrow, fear, shame, like, dislike, excite, relief and surprise). In this research, we investigate the influences of changing the clothes color in scenes where the robot's speech emotions change in time series. As a result of the experiment, it becomes clear that feeling of transmission can be improved by changing the clothes color according to the speech emotion in case that the mechanism of clothes color change is correctly understood. On the other hand, feeling of transmission is decreased in case that the mechanism is not understood.

Keywords

• communication robot
• human-robot interaction
• nonverbal information
• hue
• sensory evaluation