Users develop mental models of robots to conceptualize what kind of interactions they can have with those robots. The conceptualizations are often formed before interactions with the robot and are based only on observing the robot's physical design. As a result, understanding conceptualizations formed from physical design is necessary to understand how users intend to interact with the robot. We propose to use multimodal features of robot embodiments to predict what kinds of expectations users will have about a given robot's social and physical capabilities. We show that using such features provides information about general mental models of the robots that generalize across socially interactive robots. We describe how these models can be incorporated into interaction design and physical design for researchers working with socially interactive robots.

翻译：用户会构建关于机器人的心理模型，以概念化自身可与之进行的交互类型。这种概念化通常在与机器人实际交互前形成，仅基于对其物理设计的观察。因此，理解由物理设计形成的概念化过程，对于把握用户意图如何与机器人互动至关重要。本文提出利用机器人具身形态的多模态特征，预测用户对特定机器人社交与物理能力的预期类型。研究表明，此类特征可提供普适于各类社交交互机器人的通用心理模型信息。本文进一步阐述如何将这些模型整合至社交机器人研究者的交互设计与物理设计中。