49,298 research outputs found

    Sympathy Begins with a Smile, Intelligence Begins with a Word: Use of Multimodal Features in Spoken Human-Robot Interaction

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    Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user satisfaction in relation to dialogue characteristics. However, very little research relates a combination of multimodal social signals and language features detected during spoken face-to-face human-robot interaction to the resulting user perception of a robot. In this paper we show how different emotional facial expressions of human users, in combination with prosodic characteristics of human speech and features of human-robot dialogue, correlate with users' impressions of the robot after a conversation. We find that happiness in the user's recognised facial expression strongly correlates with likeability of a robot, while dialogue-related features (such as number of human turns or number of sentences per robot utterance) correlate with perceiving a robot as intelligent. In addition, we show that facial expression, emotional features, and prosody are better predictors of human ratings related to perceived robot likeability and anthropomorphism, while linguistic and non-linguistic features more often predict perceived robot intelligence and interpretability. As such, these characteristics may in future be used as an online reward signal for in-situ Reinforcement Learning based adaptive human-robot dialogue systems.Comment: Robo-NLP workshop at ACL 2017. 9 pages, 5 figures, 6 table

    Emotional Empathy as a Mechanism of Synchronisation in Child-Robot Interaction

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    Simulating emotional experience, emotional empathy is the fundamental ingredient of interpersonal communication. In the speaker-listener scenario, the speaker is always a child, the listener is a human or a toy robot. Two groups of neurotypical children aged 6 years on average composed the population: one Japanese (n = 20) and one French (n = 20). Revealing potential similarities in communicative exchanges in both groups when in contact with a human or a toy robot, the results might signify that emotional empathy requires the implication of an automatic identification. In this sense, emotional empathy might be considered a broad idiosyncrasy, a kind of synchronisation, offering the mind a peculiar form of communication. Our findings seem to be consistent with the assumption that children’s brains would be constructed to simulate the feelings of others in order to ensure interpersonal synchronisation

    A motion system for social and animated robots

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    This paper presents an innovative motion system that is used to control the motions and animations of a social robot. The social robot Probo is used to study Human-Robot Interactions (HRI), with a special focus on Robot Assisted Therapy (RAT). When used for therapy it is important that a social robot is able to create an "illusion of life" so as to become a believable character that can communicate with humans. The design of the motion system in this paper is based on insights from the animation industry. It combines operator-controlled animations with low-level autonomous reactions such as attention and emotional state. The motion system has a Combination Engine, which combines motion commands that are triggered by a human operator with motions that originate from different units of the cognitive control architecture of the robot. This results in an interactive robot that seems alive and has a certain degree of "likeability". The Godspeed Questionnaire Series is used to evaluate the animacy and likeability of the robot in China, Romania and Belgium

    Emotional robots: principles and practice with PARO in Denmark, Germany and the UK

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    As societies age there will be a significant increase of those over 80 and a predicted increase in people with dementia. We know that loneliness increases with old age, and those living with dementia are at risk of social isolation. Also opportunities for sensory stimulation and engagement in pleasurable activities are reduced in old age. The question is what technologies can be used to extend the range of available interventions that can enhance well-being. Emotional robots have been developed for activity and therapeutic purposes. This article explores experiences of the emotional robot PARO in Denmark, Germany and UK, and provides principles of this robot as an activity or activity with a therapeutic purpose

    Exploiting the robot kinematic redundancy for emotion conveyance to humans as a lower priority task

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    Current approaches do not allow robots to execute a task and simultaneously convey emotions to users using their body motions. This paper explores the capabilities of the Jacobian null space of a humanoid robot to convey emotions. A task priority formulation has been implemented in a Pepper robot which allows the specification of a primary task (waving gesture, transportation of an object, etc.) and exploits the kinematic redundancy of the robot to convey emotions to humans as a lower priority task. The emotions, defined by Mehrabian as points in the pleasure–arousal–dominance space, generate intermediate motion features (jerkiness, activity and gaze) that carry the emotional information. A map from this features to the joints of the robot is presented. A user study has been conducted in which emotional motions have been shown to 30 participants. The results show that happiness and sadness are very well conveyed to the user, calm is moderately well conveyed, and fear is not well conveyed. An analysis on the dependencies between the motion features and the emotions perceived by the participants shows that activity correlates positively with arousal, jerkiness is not perceived by the user, and gaze conveys dominance when activity is low. The results indicate a strong influence of the most energetic motions of the emotional task and point out new directions for further research. Overall, the results show that the null space approach can be regarded as a promising mean to convey emotions as a lower priority task.Postprint (author's final draft

    Emotional design and human-robot interaction

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    Recent years have shown an increase in the importance of emotions applied to the Design field - Emotional Design. In this sense, the emotional design aims to elicit (e.g., pleasure) or prevent (e.g., displeasure) determined emotions, during human product interaction. That is, the emotional design regulates the emotional interaction between the individual and the product (e.g., robot). Robot design has been a growing area whereby robots are interacting directly with humans in which emotions are essential in the interaction. Therefore, this paper aims, through a non-systematic literature review, to explore the application of emotional design, particularly on Human-Robot Interaction. Robot design features (e.g., appearance, expressing emotions and spatial distance) that affect emotional design are introduced. The chapter ends with a discussion and a conclusion.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

    EmIR: An emotional intelligent robot assistant

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    The development of robots that are truly sociable requires understanding how human interactions can be applied to the interaction between humans and robots. A sociable robot must be able to interact with people taking into account aspects like verbal and non-verbal communications (emotions, postures, gestures). This work presents a social robot which main goal is to provide assistance to older people in carrying out their daily activities (through suggestions or reminders). In addition, the robot presents non-verbal communications like perceiving emotions and displaying human identifiable emotions in order to express empathy. A prototype of the robot is being tested in a daycare centre in the northern area of Portugal.This work is partially supported by the MINECO/FEDER TIN2015-65515-C4- 1-R and the FPI grant AP2013-01276 awarded to Jaime-Andres Rincon. Angelo Costa thanks the FCT - Fundacao para a Ciencia e Tecnologia for the PostDoc grant SFRH/BPD/102696/2014. This work is supported by FCT within the projects UID/CEC/00319/2013 and COMPETE: POCI-01-0145-FEDER007043
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