The Zoomorphic Miro Robot’s Affective Expression Design and Perceived Appearance

This article proposes design guidelines for 11 affective expressions for the Miro robot, and evaluates the expressions through an online video study with 116 participants. All expressions were recognized significantly above the chance level. For six of the expressions, the correct response was selected significantly more than the others, while more than one emotion was associated to some other expressions. Design decisions and the robot’s limitations that led to selecting other expressions, along with the correct expression, are discussed. We also investigated how participants’ abilities to recognize human and animal emotions, their tendency to anthropomorphize, and their familiarity with and attitudes towards animals and pets might have influenced the recognition of the robot’s affective expressions. Results show significant impact of human emotion recognition, difficulty in understanding animal emotions, and anthropomorphism tendency on recognition of Robot’s expressions. We did not find such effects regarding familiarity with/attitudes towards animals/pets in terms of how they influenced participants’ recognition of the designed affective expressions. We further studied how the robot is perceived in general and showed that it is mostly perceived to be gender neutral, and, while it is often associated with a dog or a rabbit, it can also be perceived as a variety of other animals.