Evaluating Virtual Emotional Expression Systems for Human Robot Interaction in Rehabilitation Domain

As rehabilitation robots are increasingly serving to improve the quality of life for physically disabled people in clinical environments, the concept of emotional expressiveness in robots becomes increasingly important. The human perception of robot's emotional expressions plays a crucial role in human robot interaction. Virtual expression systems outperform hardware systems in realizing human like expressions due the limitations in hardware actuators and advances in animation tools. This paper evaluates the human perception of robot's emotional expressions with two different virtual emotional expression systems: one where the robot exhibits emotions through icon faced expressions and in other the robot exhibits emotions through human faced expressions in clinical environment. A rehabilitation HRI research robot Robbie is introduced and the results of the comparative study on human perception of robotpsilas emotional expressions with two different systems are discussed.