Investigation on Effects of Color, Sound, and Vibration on Human's Emotional Perception

Abstract

As robotics has advanced, research on conveying a robot's emotional state to a person has become a hot topic. Most current studies are focused on interaction modalities such as facial expressions and natural language. Although many of the results seem to be promising, they suffer from high cost and technical difficulties. In this paper, we turn our attention to three other interaction modalities: color, sound, and vibration. Such modalities have the advantage of being simple, low cost, and intuitive. We conducted a pilot study to evaluate the effects of the three modalities on a human's emotional perception towards our robot Maru. Our result indicates that humans tend to interpret a robot's emotion as negative (angry in particular) when vibration and sound are used, while they interpret the emotion as relaxed when only color modality is used. In addition, the participants showed preference towards the robot when using all three modalities.