Investigating the Uncanny Valley and human desires for interactive robots

A number of challenges are posed to the design of appearance, behavioural, interactive and learning capabilities of robots by their domestic applications. The humanlike appearance is expected to elicit more natural response from human and to receive a warm welcome in human society. On the other hand a phenomenon called "Uncanny Valley" has been suggested by researchers to limit the human likeness in appearance of robots to a certain level claiming negative feelings generated in human users by designs between a certain level of similarity and perfect human likeness. Recently some researchers have opposed this phenomenon and support the human likeness in robotic design. This paper presents a study of views from robotic researchers about human likeness and other challenges in robotic design. Further a survey was conducted to obtain and analyze the responses of people towards some humanlike robots presented in China Robot Exhibition 2006. The paper presents and discusses the results of this study of human responses towards humanlike robots.