Designing Robotic Movement with Personality

As robots are starting to inhabit more intimate social spheres, their functionality and acceptance in a fundamentally social environment greatly depend on them being tolerated by humans. One factor contributing to successfully accomplishing tasks in a collaborative manner is how robots’ actions and motions are interpreted by the people around them. Our broader research seeks to explore this gap aiming to design movement that is expressive, culturally dependent and contextually sensitive. A country that is at the forefront of this, in terms of social robots and their acceptance in society, is Japan. Therefore, as the first phases of this broader research, we present a new process, including a design toolkit, an open brief and a participatory structure. We discuss the resulting robot morphologies and participant feedback from a workshop in Japan, and conclude by discussing limitations and further research in designing robots with expressive movement, contextually sensitive within an HRI-for-all paradigm.