Generating Emotional Gestures for Handling Social Failures in HRI

As people are getting more used to interact with social robots, their expectations of these robots also increase. However, robots are not always able to meet such expectations due to the limitations of the hardware and the software, or it might be possible that robots are simply unable to correctly elaborate the information about the agents, environment and context, and as consequence they produce erroneous behaviours. For example, a robot might get incongruous responses of people from the observations of multimodal systems. In such case, a technique used by humans is verbal irony, or sarcasm which it is a form of verbal irony, to recover from the situation. To this extent, we present a two parts study where we aimed to endow a robot with sarcasm. Results showed that social interacting behaviours, such as paying attention during a conversation, being transparent on the process of thinking and elaborating a response, allow people's to perceive a robot with higher anthropomorphism and animacy. Moreover, robot failure recovery mechanisms are easier recognised by people when they use verbal incongruence.