Getting feedback from a miniature robot

The HRI field of research has gained much attention recently because of the expected importance of well designed interaction modalities with social robots. To achieve natural interaction between the robot and the human, a feedback mechanism from the robot to the human needs to be designed that allows the robot to express its internal state to the human in a natural way. Verbal and nonverbal feedback from humanoid robots or humanoid robotic heads have been widely studied but there is little comparable research about the possible feedback mechanisms of non-humanoid and especially miniature robots. In this paper a comparison between using verbal feedback and motion cues is conducted. The results of the experiment showed that there is no significant difference in the task completion accuracy and time or in the feeling of naturalness between these two modalities and there is a statistically significant improvement when using any of them compared with the no-feedback (control) case. Moreover the subjects selected the motion cues feedback mechanism more frequently as the preferred feedback modality for them.