Perception of Emotional Gait-like Motion of Mobile Humanoid Robot Using Vertical Oscillation

This paper presents a subjective evaluation of the emotions of a wheeled mobile humanoid robot expressing emotions during movement by replicating human gait-induced upper body motion. For this purpose, we proposed the robot equipped with a vertical oscillation mechanism that generates such motion by focusing on human center-of-mass trajectory. In the experiment, participants watched videos of the robot's different emotional gait-induced upper body motions, and assess the type of emotion shown, and their confidence level in their answer. We calculated the emotion recognition rate and the average confidence level of their answers. As a result, we found that participants gave higher confidence levels in their assessment for the robot's emotional movement with vertical oscillation than one without it.