Gender Effects in Observation of Robotic and Humanoid Actions

Abstract

Robots are gaining an increasingly important role in industrial production. Notably, a high level of acceptance is an important factor for co-working situation between human and robot. The aim of the present study was to investigate the differences in the perception of anthropomorphic and robotic movements using models consisting of a virtual robot and a digital human. Videos of each model displayed different degrees of human likeness or robot likeness in speed and trajectories of placing movements. Female and male participants were asked to rate on a Likert scale the perceived levels of human likeness or robot likeness in the two models. Overall, results suggest that males were sensitive to the differences between robotic and anthropomorphic movements, whereas females showed no difference between them. However, compared to males, female participants attributed more anthropomorphic features to robotic movements. The study is a first step toward a more comprehensive understanding of the human ability to differentiate between anthropomorphic and robotic movements and suggests a crucial role of gender in the human-robot interaction.

Keywords: anthropomorphism; digital human model; gantry robot model; gender effect; human-robot interaction; mirror neurons system; motion perception.

FIGURE 1

Experimental setting to track human placement movements (Kuz et al., 2015). (A) Initial position with the tracking markers M1, M2, M3, M4. (B) Target position.

FIGURE 2

Example for robot model for the four movements on the grid pad we recorded for the human model and the robot model.

FIGURE 3

Visual representation of the factorial design: the depicted trajectories (projections on the X, Y plane) belong to a digital human model and to a gantry robot model performing anthropomorphic and robotic movements. The unit is millimeter (mm).

FIGURE 4

Gender x movement type interaction, including standard error bars. On the y-axis the 5-point rating scale is depicted (5 = very anthropomorphic; 1 = very robotic).