Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties
of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of
communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for
collaborative robots if they are to interact naturally and effectively. For
example, suppose a robot is handing over a fragile object. In that case, the
human who receives it should be informed of its fragility in advance, through
an immediate and implicit message, i.e., by the direct modulation of the
robot's action. This work investigates the perception of object manipulations
performed with a communicative intent by two robots with different embodiments
(an iCub humanoid robot and a Baxter robot). We designed the robots' movements
to communicate carefulness or not during the transportation of objects. We
found that not only this feature is correctly perceived by human observers, but
it can elicit as well a form of motor adaptation in subsequent human object
manipulations. In addition, we get an insight into which motion features may
induce to manipulate an object more or less carefully.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL) 2022 - 12th ICD