How Robots Influence Humans: A Survey of Nonverbal Communication in Social Human–Robot Interaction

As robots become more prevalent in society, investigating the interactions between humans and robots is important to ensure that these robots adhere to the social norms and expectations of human users. In particular, it is important to explore exactly how the nonverbal behaviors of robots influence humans due to the dominant role nonverbal communication plays in social interactions. In this paper, we present a detailed survey on this topic focusing on four main nonverbal communication modes: kinesics, proxemics, haptics, and chronemics, as well as multimodal combinations of these modes. We uniquely investigate findings that span across these different nonverbal modes and how they influence humans in four separate ways: shifting cognitive framing, eliciting emotional responses, triggering specific behavioral responses, and improving task performance. A detailed discussion is presented to provide insights on nonverbal robot behaviors with respect to the aforementioned influence types and to discuss future research directions in this field.