Can people categorize emotions from color and movement in a robot? 

Designing non-verbal behavior with a simple spherical robot

This project aims to provide an extensible approach on designing emotionally expressive behavior in low-degree of freedom and constrained appearance robots. Can people categorize emotion from color and movement from a robot without limbs or head? An empirical study is carried out on a commercially available simple spherical robot, Sphero. The robot is designed to present happy and sad emotion by applying two psychological models: Laban Movement Analysis for movement design and Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions for LED color. 78 participants attributed scores based on video clips with the different combination of LED colors and movement paths in Sphero. Experimental results show movement with applying Laban’s model gives significant clue for emotion classification, however, LED color with Plutchik’s theory is not an effective tool in emotion expression.