Users' Perception Variance in Emotional Embodied Robots for Domestic Tasks

Emotion is an important part of behavior and communication for human interaction, both with other humans and with machines. Social robots need to reach a level of acceptance for tasks that require suggest things to humans. However, it is difficult to achieve a human-like appearance and the expected social behavior without falling in the uncanny valley. In this paper, we investigate the interference in emotional response and acceptance of a robot to home living tasks and suggestion behaviors. Our hypothesis is that the shape of the robots affects the acceptance, specially when the robot was to suggest or give some orders to humans. A state-of-art commercial robot and a Robocup@home robot performed activities involving suggestion and games. The results showed that the recognition of emotions was much better in the robot LARA (with face expressions), and it was as well accepted as the commercial robot.