Affective body movement based on an actor is expressed by a humanoid robot NAO. A series of experiments investigates the dependence of age, presence and contextualization in social human-robot interaction.
Self-reported metrics, eye-tracking and interviews are used to gather data on young and old adults' perception of emotions expressed through body movement. A game is designed and implemented which enables the robot to interact autonomously with participants.
It is found that Danish seniors have lower accuracy of identifying sadness in body motion of a robot compared and difference gaze patterns compared to students. The context of a game does not improve the emotion perception accuracy. Both groups show interest in being serviced by robots.
For the development of humanoid robots special attention should be taken to ensure that age dependent communication issues do not arise.