A Simple Nod of the Head: The Effect of Minimal Robot Movements on Children's Perception of a Low-Anthropomorphic Robot

In this note, we present minimal robot movements for robotic technology for children. Two types of minimal gaze movements were designed: social-gaze movements to communicate social engagement and deictic-gaze movements to communicate task-related referential information. In a two (social-gaze movements vs. none) by two (deictic-gaze movements vs. none) video-based study (n=72), we found that social-gaze movements significantly increased children's perception of animacy and likeability of the robot. Deictic-gaze and social-gaze movements significantly increased children's perception of helpfulness. Our findings show the compelling communicative power of social-gaze movements, and to a lesser extent deictic-gaze movements, and have implications for designers who want to achieve animacy, likeability and helpfulness with simple and easily implementable minimal robot movements. Our work contributes to human-robot interaction research and design by providing a first indication of the potential of minimal robot movements to communicate social engagement and helpful referential information to children