Communicating affect via flight path Exploring use of the Laban Effort System for designing affective locomotion paths

People and animals use various kinds of motion in a multitude of ways to communicate their ideas and affective state, such as their moods or emotions. Further, people attribute affect and personalities to movements of even non-life like entities based solely on the style of their motions, e.g., the locomotion style of a geometric shape (how it moves about) can be interpreted as being shy, aggressive, etc. We investigate how robots can leverage this locomotion-style communication channel for communication with people. Specifically, our work deals with designing stylistic flying-robot locomotion paths for communicating affective state. To author and unpack the parameters of affect-oriented flying-robot locomotion styles we employ the Laban Effort System, a standard method for interpreting human motion commonly used in the performing arts. This paper describes our adaption of the Laban Effort System to author motions for flying robots, and the results of a formal experiment that investigated how various Laban Effort System parameters influence people´s perception of the resulting robotic motions. We summarize with a set of guidelines for aiding designers in using the Laban Effort System to author flying robot motions to elicit desired affective responses.