Design of Perceptually Meaningful Quality in Robotic Motion

Robots that need to operate in human-facing environments will need complex options for modifying their movement to communicate changing state information. To that end, this paper builds on a method for creating variation in robotic movement and presents methods for improving this variation. In particular, a method using optimal control to modify the quality of robotic movements is updated to include generated sounds and a more expressive reference trajectory. The experimental design for finding the qualitative mapping between movement and sound, which leveraged expert musicians, and the experiment results are presented. Based on feedback from experiment participants, an improved method for generating movement variation is proposed. This method generates enhanced variations in robotic movement trajectories using the affinities between Effort and Space as described in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (LBMS) to further improve people’s perception of the qualities of robotic movement.