Analysis of Humanoid appearances in human-robot interaction

Identifying the extent to which the appearance of a humanoid robot affects human behavior toward it is important. We compared participant impressions of and behaviors toward two real humanoid robots in simple human-robot interactions. These two robots, which have different appearances but are controlled to perform the same recorded utterances and motions, are adjusted by a motion-capturing system. We conducted an experiment with 48 human participants who individually interacted with the two robots and also with a human for reference. The results revealed that different appearances did not affect participant verbal behaviors, but they did affect such nonverbal behaviors as distance and delay of response. These differences are explained by two factors: impressions and attributions.