Seeing Eye to Eye: Design and Evaluation of a Custom Expressive Eye Display Module for the Stretch Mobile Manipulator
Rafael Morales Mayoral, Sean Buchmeier, Stayce Mockel, Courtney J. Chavez, Naomi T. Fitter
Abstract
Mobile manipulators — robots with a moving base and an arm for grasping objects — are becoming more common in human-populated environments, such as hospitals, warehouses, and even homes. Yet most mobile manipulators lack clear ways to communicate intent to human interlocutors in a continuous, socially acceptable, and easy-to-interpret way. One possible solution for improving mobile manipulator communication is the addition of expressive eyes. This paper presents the design and evaluation of a custom expressive LED eye module for mobile manipulators, which can display both gaze and emotional expressions. Our evaluation study <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$(N=32)$</tex> involved a mock teamwork task alongside a Hello Robot Stretch RE2 mobile manipulator with the custom LED eye module. The results showed that both gaze and emotional expressions supported better participant performance in the task and more feelings of social closeness. Emotional eye expressions also yielded higher ratings of robot social warmth and competence. This work can inform mobile manipulator design for smoother integration into human-populated spaces.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2025_seeingeyetoeyede,
title = {Seeing Eye to Eye: Design and Evaluation of a Custom Expressive Eye Display Module for the Stretch Mobile Manipulator},
author = {Rafael Morales Mayoral and Sean Buchmeier and Stayce Mockel and Courtney J. Chavez and Naomi T. Fitter},
booktitle = {ICRA 2025},
year = {2025}
}