Humans Perform Social Movements in Response to Social Robot Movements: Motor Intention in Human-Robot Interaction

We tested whether the observation of motor action encoding social motor intention would cause the spontaneous processing of a complementary response when performed by a humanoid robot. We designed the robot's arm and upper body movements to manifest the kinematic profiles of human individual and social motor intention and designed a simple task that involved robot and human placing blocks on a table sequentially. Our results show that the behavior of the human can be modulated by human kinematics as encoded in a robot's movement. In several cases human subjects reciprocated movement that displayed social motor intention with movements showing a similar kinematic profile while attempting to make eye contact and engaging in turn-taking behaviour during the task. This suggests a novel approach in the design of HRI based in motor processing that promises to be ecologically valid, cheap, automatic, fast, resilient, intuitive, and computationally simple.