  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.
