EAVE: Emotional Aerial Vehicle Evaluator

Abstract

Today, semi-autonomous quadrotors are already available at affordable prices and have the potential to become part of everyday life due to the variety of possible applications. To ensure that people feel safe around quadrotors and to optimize flight times, their size should be kept to a minimum which results in their appearances remaining purely functional. This reduces the possibility of adding anthropomorphic or zoomorphic features that are typically used in order to increase acceptability by conveying the robot's intent or emotion. Constrained by mechanical appearance, other non-verbal communication channels can be exploited instead, in particular robot motion. The application EAVE presented in this paper was developed with the idea to design and evaluate trajectories that breathe life into inanimate, mechanical quadrotors in order to improve interaction in human-robot companionships. It extends our existing quadrotor testbed ICARUS, which is capable of tracking arbitrary trajectories of real and simulated quadrotors that were designed using EAVE. We demonstrate that applying some of the established principles of character animation to the design of quadrotor trajectories opens up the possibility of conveying intent and improving interaction, though the appearance of the quadrotor remains purely functional.