Influence of upper body pose mirroring in human-robot interaction

Abstract

This paper explores the effect of upper body pose mirroring in human-robot interaction. A group of participants is used to evaluate how imitation by a robot affects people’s perception of their conversation with it. A set of twelve questions about the participants’ university experience serves as a backbone for the dialogue structure. In our experimental evaluation, the robot reacts in one of three ways to the human upper body pose: ignoring it, displaying its own upper body pose, and mirroring it. The manner in which the robot behaviour influences human appraisal is analysed using the standard Godspeed questionnaire. Our results show that robot body mirroring/non-mirroring influences the perceived humanness of the robot. The results also indicate that body pose mirroring is an important factor in facilitating rapport and empathy in human social interactions with robots.