A Motion System for Social and Animated Robots

This paper presents an innovative Motion System that is used to control the motions and animations of a social robot. The social robot Probo is used to study Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) with a special focus on Robot Assisted Therapy (RAT). When used for therapy it is important that a social robot is able to create an "illusion of life" to become a believable character that can communicate with humans. The design of the motion system in this paper is based on insights from the animation industry. It combines operator-controlled animations with low-level autonomous reactions such as attention and emotion. The Motion System has a Combination Engine, which combines motion commands that are triggered by a human operator with motions that are originating from different units of the cognitive control architecture of the robot. This results in an interactive robot that seems alive and has a certain degree of "Likeability". The Godspeed Questionnaire Series is used to evaluate the Animacy and Likeability of the robot in China, Romania and Belgium.