  Mirroring non-verbal social cues such as affect or movement can enhance
human-human and human-robot interactions in the real world. The robotic
platforms and control methods also impact people's perception of human-robot
interaction. However, limited studies have compared robot imitation across
different platforms and control methods. Our research addresses this gap by
conducting two experiments comparing people's perception of affective mirroring
between the iCub and Pepper robots and movement mirroring between vision-based
iCub control and Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)-based iCub control. We
discovered that the iCub robot was perceived as more humanlike than the Pepper
robot when mirroring affect. A vision-based controlled iCub outperformed the
IMU-based controlled one in the movement mirroring task. Our findings suggest
that different robotic platforms impact people's perception of robots'
mirroring during HRI. The control method also contributes to the robot's
mirroring performance. Our work sheds light on the design and application of
different humanoid robots in the real world.
