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Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces

Published: 26 February 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Faces are critical in establishing the agency of social robots; however, building expressive mechanical faces is costly and difficult. Instead, many robots built in recent years have faces that are rendered onto a screen. This gives great flexibility in what a robot's face can be and opens up a new design space with which to establish a robot's character and perceived properties. Despite the prevalence of robots with rendered faces, there are no systematic explorations of this design space. Our work aims to fill that gap. We conducted a survey and identified 157 robots with rendered faces and coded them in terms of 76 properties. We present statistics, common patterns, and observations about this data set of faces. Next, we conducted two surveys to understand people's perceptions of rendered robot faces and identify the impact of different face features. Survey results indicate preferences for varying levels of realism and detail in robot faces based on context, and indicate how the presence or absence of specific features affects perception of the face and the types of jobs the face would be appropriate for.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HRI '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction
    February 2018
    468 pages
    ISBN:9781450349536
    DOI:10.1145/3171221
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 26 February 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. robot face design
    2. social robots

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    • (2025)MetaMorph -- A Metamodelling Approach For Robot MorphologyProceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction10.5555/3721488.3721566(627-636)Online publication date: 4-Mar-2025
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