Responding to Micro-Emotions: Towards neutral interactions between pedestrians and autonomous delivery vehicles

Abstract

The way an autonomous delivery vehicle behaves during an encounter with a pedestrian evokes an experience comprised of many short-term emotions, influences which behaviour that person will use in reaction to the robot. In many cases, for both the negative and positive experiences, behaviour emerges that results in time-consuming encounters. This time could be used for deliveries but in order to have a neutral interaction a behavioural change is required. Prior work by Desmet has mapped these ‘micro-emotions’ and described how they can be used to drive product design and shape product experience. As the sensing capacities and intelligence of our artefacts are increasing new opportunities arise. Could these micro-emotions also be used to shape the experience while a product is in use? We conducted a case study on an encounter between pedestrians and a small delivery robot. A clustering, based on people’s initial micro-emotions and experience, seemed to effectively capture how they would subsequently respond to the robot. We were able to design robot behaviour from these ‘emotion-clusters’ that helps to shape people’s response and experience according to achieve a time-efficient/neutral encounter. This concept opens up the exciting new design space of products that actively respond to micro-emotions.