What People See in 157 Robot Faces

In recent years, an increasing number of robots have relied on screens rather than physical mechanisms to generate expressive faces. Screens are cheap, they're easy to work with, and they allow for nearly unlimited creativity. Consequently, there's an enormous variety of robot faces, with a spectrum of similarities and differences both obvious and subtle. However, there hasn't been a comprehensive study of the entire design space, possibly because of how large it is, and this is bad, because there's a lot to learn. At the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human Robot Interaction (HRI) last month, roboticists from the University of Washington in Seattle presented a paper entitled "Characterizing the Design Space of Rendered Robot Faces."