For service robots operating in indoor environments, the crucial task of navigation is often complicated by the presence of people. Simply treating humans in the environment as additional (often moving) obstacles can violate the complex set of social rules by which people navigate around each other. In contrast, emulating human behavior and navigating in a socially appropriate manner could positively affect people's comfort with a robot's presence and motion. We present a method of generating social paths for a robot to approach a person based on a small amount of human data. We also conducted a study in which a robot approached participants using both these social paths and straight-line, nonsocial paths. We found that both approaches were rated comparably when the robot approached from the participant's front or side, but the social approach was significantly preferred when the robot came from behind the participant.

In this work we identify low-level aspects of robot motion that can be exploited to create impressions of agency and lifelikeness. In two experiments, participants view split-screen videos of multiple robots set to music and rate the robots on their dance ability, lifelikeness, and entertainment value. The first experiment tests the impact of the correspondence (or lack thereof) of the robot's motion to the underlying rhythm of the music, and the effect of matching changes in the robot's movement to changes in the music, such as a phrase of vocals or drumming. This motivates a second experiment which more deeply explores the relationships of asynchrony and changes in motion repertoire to participants' perceptions of the lifelikeness of the robot's motion. Findings indicate that perceptions of the lifelikeness of the robot and the quality of the dance can be manipulated by simple changes, such as variation in the repertoire of motions, coordination of changes in behavior with events in the music, and the addition of flaws to the robot's synchrony with the music.

Does the emotional content of a robot's speech affect how people teach it? In this experiment, participants were asked to demonstrate several "dances" for a robot to learn. Participants moved their bodies in response to instructions displayed on a screen behind the robot. Meanwhile, the robot faced the participant and appeared to emulate the participant's movements. After each demonstration, the robot received an accuracy score and the participant chose whether or not to demonstrate that dance again. Regardless of the participant's input, however, the robot's dancing and the scores it received were arranged in advance and constant across all participants. The only variation between groups in this study was what the robot said in response to its scores. Participants saw one of three conditions: appropriate emotional responses, often-inappropriate emotional responses, or apathetic responses. Participants that taught the robot with appropriate emotional responses demonstrated the dances, on average, significantly more frequently and significantly more accurately than participants in the other two conditions.

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