Personality Traits Influence the Perception of a Robotic Arm endowed with Social Cues

When interacting with robots, humans follow similar behavioral patterns as when they interact with other humans. In fact, the personality traits of people have a role in modifying how users perceive a robot that is interacting with them. Similarly, different combinations of social cues on a robot could modify its perception in terms of social aspects. In this context, this paper aims to explore the role of personality in the interaction with a robotic arm and it will investigate how different social cues can affect its perception. The social cues considered in this work are the face, the sound, and 2 different movements (i.e., direct and indirect). Thirty healthy people were included in this experiment. They were requested to perform a robot-to-human handover with different “social” properties. Quantitative feedbacks were collected through a questionnaire to evaluate the perceived emotion, fluidity, likeability, safety, and animacy of the interaction. Participants were divided into 2 clusters based on their Openness personality trait. Results show that when increasing the number of social cues on the robotic arm, the human perception tends to have a similar score for the 2 types of movements, while the differences were higher when comparing the scores of the interaction without social cues.