Using Affect as a Communication Modality to Improve Human-Robot Communication in Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue Scenarios

Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants, respectively, to investigate the benefits of using emotions as a communication modality for Search And Rescue (SAR) robots. In the first experiment, we investigated the feasibility of conveying information related to SAR situations through robots’ emotions, resulting in mappings from SAR situations to emotions. The second study used Affect Control Theory as an alternative method for deriving such mappings. This method is more flexible, e.g., allows for such mappings to be adjusted for different emotion sets and different robots. In the third experiment, we created affective expressions for an appearance-constrained outdoor field research robot using LEDs as an expressive channel. Using these affective expressions in a variety of simulated SAR situations, we evaluated the effect of these expressions on participants’ (in the role rescue workers) situational awareness. Our results and proposed methodologies (a) provide insights on how emotions could help conveying messages in the context of SAR, and (b) show evidence on the effectiveness of adding emotions as a communication modality in a (simulated) SAR communication context.