Investigating the Role of Multi-modal Social Cues in Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Settings

Expressing social cues through different communication channels plays an important role in mutual understanding, in both human-human and human-robot collaborations. A few studies investigated the effects of zoomorphic and anthropomorphic social cues expressed by industrial robot arms on robot-to-human communication. In this work, we investigate the role of multi-modal social cues by combining the robot’s head-like gestures with light and sound modalities in two studies. The first study found that multi-modal social cues have positive effects on people’s perception of the robot, perceived enjoyment, and intention to use. The second study found that a combination of human-like gestures with light and/or sound modalities could lead to a higher understandability of the robot’s social cues. These findings suggest the use of multi-modal social cues for robots in industrial settings. However, the possible negative impacts when implementing these social cues should be considered e.g. overtrust, and distraction.