Navigating a Social World with Robot Partners: A Quantitative Cartography of the Uncanny Valley

Human-robot interactions may be complicated by Uncanny Valley (UV) effects, with imperfect human-likeness provoking dislike. We resolve methodological problems of previous literature and demonstrate an UV in subjects’ ratings of likability for a large, objectively chosen sample of 80 real-world robot faces and a complementary controlled set of edited faces.