Nonverbal humor as a new dimension of HRI

While humor is an important aspect of human interaction, this topic has been largely neglected in the field of robotic research. Apart from single text-based humor production systems, non-verbal humor based on gestures, facial expressions, or whole body movements has not been the target of HRI-research so far. In this paper, we present our results on the effects of nonverbal humor displayed by a service robot. Participants were served by a conventional and a ldquofunnyrdquo robot in our experiment. The humorous robot exerted four different kinds of nonverbal humor during the interaction process whereas the conventional robot simply delivered the requested objects. The users´ ratings demonstrate the positive effect of humor on the evaluation of different characteristics of the robot, as well as on the perceived interaction quality. To our knowledge, the study described here is the first to investigate the effect of behavioral humor produced by a robot.