Moving with Style: Classifying Human and Robot Movement at Home

Abstract

A robot moving in the home is a new experience for most people. Classifying the different ways that humans and robots move together can help in designing interactions. In this paper, we first put robots’ movements into two categories: global—where a robot changes position in the home—or local—where a robot’s position does not change, but parts of it move. We also look at the idea of animation and how it can give a robot style. Building on these definitions, we present four movement conditions to classify movement between a human and robot at home. Using familiarity, we can recognize some of these conditions from other interactions we have. Using animation, we can give the robot a style that can make the robot’s movement more familiar and easier to understand. We close the paper with possible ways of using this classification system for future research. © 2018 IARIA