The interaction between voice and appearance in the embodiment of a robot tutor

Robot embodiment is, by its very nature, holistic and understanding how various aspects contribute to the user perception of the robot is non-trivial. A study is presented here that investigates whether there is an interaction effect between voice and other aspects of embodiment, such as movement and appearance, in a pedagogical setting. An on-line study was distributed to children aged 11–17 that uses a modified Godspeed questionnaire. We show an interaction effect between the robot embodiment and voice in terms of perceived lifelikeness of the robot. Politeness is a key strategy used in learning and teaching, and here an effect is also observed for perceived politeness. Interestingly, participants’ overall preference was for embodiment combinations that are deemed polite and more like a teacher, but are not necessarily the most lifelike. From these findings, we are able to inform the design of robotic tutors going forward

Electric field emissions of FPGA chip based on gigahertz transverse electromagnetic cell modeling and measurements

Modern integrated circuits (ICs) are significant sources of undesired electromagnetic wave. Therefore, characterization of chip-level emission is essential to comply with EMC tests at the product level. A Gigahertz Transverse Electromagnetic (GTEM) cell is a common test instrument used to measure IC radiated emission and the test cost is relatively low. Regular IC radiated emission measurements using GTEM tend to neglect some significant emission sources. Thus, this research proposed an alternative methodology to perform field measurement of the IC inside the GTEM cell in order to optimize the field measurements. This research study also attempted analysis of the overall GTEM cell performance using transmission line theory. An FPGA chip was adopted as the IC under test because of its flexibility in configuration to any digital circuit. The investigations discovered that the impact of the FPGA board supporting components and interconnection cables can be significantly reduced with appropriate shielding and grounding. The electric field predict a far distance from the FPGA chip was carried out based on the dipole moment technique. In particular, the dipole moment model emphasizing the tiny horizontal and vertical radiation elements inside the FPGA chip as Hertzian antenna and small current loop. Equations to predict the horizontal and vertical electric field were developed based on Hertzian antenna and small current loop which relate the tiny radiation sources to electric and magnetic dipole moments. The prediction was validated with 3-meter field measurements in a semi-anechoic chamber. On top of that, a spiral-like pattern was developed to obtain a correction factor for further improvement of the correlation between prediction and SAC measurement. The results revealed that the correction factor effectively reduced the gap between the prediction and measurement fields and boosted the correlation coefficient by 44%. The difference of peak values also has limited to less than 0dB after correction. These results suggest a promising finding for a future EMI test of ICs with a cheaper GTEM cell

A template based user-teaching system for an Assistive Robot

Demographics issues, characterised by an increasing elderly population, are expected to be a major concern both in Europe and other countries around the world. A proposed cost and care solution to these issues has been suggested that uses assistive robots in 'smarthome' environments. The deployment of such integrated facilities presents many challenges, one of which concerns the customisation of such systems to meet the needs of the elderly person themselves. One approach is to allow the elderly person to actually teach the robot sufficient behaviours that meet their care requirements. The teaching could equally well be carried out by the elderly person's relatives or carers. The overriding premise being that teaching is both intuitive and 'non-technical'. As part of a European project investigating these issues we have deployed a commercially available robot in a fully sensorised but otherwise ordinary suburban house, and designed a non-technical teaching system, based on behavioural templates, to achieve this goal. We have evaluated this integrated system within the house with 20 participants in a Human-Robot interaction experiment. Results indicate that participants overall found the interface easy to use, and felt that they would be capable of using it in a real-life situation. There were also some salient individual differences within the sample

Electricity consumption forecasting using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS)

Universiti Tun Hussein Onn Malaysia (UTHM) is a developing Malaysian Technical University. There is a great development of UTHM since its formation in 1993. Therefore, it is crucial to have accurate future electricity consumption forecasting for its future energy management and saving. Even though there are previous works of electricity consumption forecasting using Adaptive Neuro-Fuzzy Inference System (ANFIS), but most of their data are multivariate data. In this study, we have only univariate data of UTHM electricity consumption from January 2009 to December 2018 and wish to forecast 2019 consumption. The univariate data was converted to multivariate and ANFIS was chosen as it carries both advantages of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) and Fuzzy Inference System (FIS). ANFIS yields the MAPE between actual and predicted electricity consumption of 0.4002% which is relatively low if compared to previous works of UTHM electricity forecasting using time series model (11.14%), and first-order fuzzy time series (5.74%), and multiple linear regression (10.62%)

Virtual Borders: Accurate Definition of a Mobile Robot's Workspace Using Augmented Reality

We address the problem of interactively controlling the workspace of a mobile robot to ensure a human-aware navigation. This is especially of relevance for non-expert users living in human-robot shared spaces, e.g. home environments, since they want to keep the control of their mobile robots, such as vacuum cleaning or companion robots. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders that are respected by a robot while performing its tasks. For this purpose, we employ a RGB-D Google Tango tablet as human-robot interface in combination with an augmented reality application to flexibly define virtual borders. We evaluated our system with 15 non-expert users concerning accuracy, teaching time and correctness and compared the results with other baseline methods based on visual markers and a laser pointer. The experimental results show that our method features an equally high accuracy while reducing the teaching time significantly compared to the baseline methods. This holds for different border lengths, shapes and variations in the teaching process. Finally, we demonstrated the correctness of the approach, i.e. the mobile robot changes its navigational behavior according to the user-defined virtual borders.Comment: Accepted on 2018 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), supplementary video: https://youtu.be/oQO8sQ0JBR

The Usage and Evaluation of Anthropomorphic Form in Robot Design

There are numerous examples illustrating the application of human shape in everyday products. Usage of anthropomorphic form has long been a basic design strategy, particularly in the design of intelligent service robots. As such, it is desirable to use anthropomorphic form not only in aesthetic design but also in interaction design. Proceeding from how anthropomorphism in various domains has taken effect on human perception, we assumed that anthropomorphic form used in appearance and interaction design of robots enriches the explanation of its function and creates familiarity with robots. From many cases we have found, misused anthropomorphic form lead to user disappointment or negative impressions on the robot. In order to effectively use anthropomorphic form, it is necessary to measure the similarity of an artifact to the human form (humanness), and then evaluate whether the usage of anthropomorphic form fits the artifact. The goal of this study is to propose a general evaluation framework of anthropomorphic form for robot design. We suggest three major steps for framing the evaluation: 'measuring anthropomorphic form in appearance', 'measuring anthropomorphic form in Human-Robot Interaction', and 'evaluation of accordance of two former measurements'. This evaluation process will endow a robot an amount of humanness in their appearance equivalent to an amount of humanness in interaction ability, and then ultimately facilitate user satisfaction. Keywords: Anthropomorphic Form; Anthropomorphism; Human-Robot Interaction; Humanness; Robot Design</p