Human Impression of Humanoid Robots Mirroring Social Cues
Di Fu, Fares Abawi, Philipp Allgeuer, Stefan Wermter
TL;DR
The study investigates how the choice of humanoid platform (iCub vs Pepper) and control method (vision-based vs IMU-based) affects human judgments of mirroring in social interactions. Through two experiments, the authors show that iCub elicits a more humanlike impression for affective mirroring, while vision-based control on iCub provides smoother and more precise movement mirroring than IMU-based control. The work highlights the impact of hardware and control pipelines on perceived social intelligence and responsiveness, offering practical guidance for deploying humanoid robots in real-world settings. Overall, platform and control method choices meaningfully shape HRI experiences and should be considered in robot design and application.
Abstract
Mirroring non-verbal social cues such as affect or movement can enhance human-human and human-robot interactions in the real world. The robotic platforms and control methods also impact people's perception of human-robot interaction. However, limited studies have compared robot imitation across different platforms and control methods. Our research addresses this gap by conducting two experiments comparing people's perception of affective mirroring between the iCub and Pepper robots and movement mirroring between vision-based iCub control and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based iCub control. We discovered that the iCub robot was perceived as more humanlike than the Pepper robot when mirroring affect. A vision-based controlled iCub outperformed the IMU-based controlled one in the movement mirroring task. Our findings suggest that different robotic platforms impact people's perception of robots' mirroring during HRI. The control method also contributes to the robot's mirroring performance. Our work sheds light on the design and application of different humanoid robots in the real world.