The Influence of Behavioral Complexity on Robot Perception

Since robots’ capabilities increase, they will soon be present in our daily lives and will be required to interact with humans in a natural way. Furthermore, robots will need to be removed from controlled environments and tested in public places where untrained people will be able to freely interact with them. Such needs raise a number of issues: what kind of behaviors are considered important in promoting interaction and how these behaviors affect people’s perception regarding the robot in terms of anthropomorphism, likeability, animacy and perceived intelligence. In this paper, we propose a motivational and emotional system that drives the robot’s behavior and test it against six interaction scenarios of varying complexity. In addition, we evaluate our system in two different environments: a controlled (laboratory) environment and a public space. Results suggest that the perception of the robot significantly changes depending on the complexity of the interaction but does not change depending on the environment.