A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication

In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion

Towards a framework for socially interactive robots

250 p.En las últimas décadas, la investigación en el campo de la robótica social ha crecido considerablemente. El desarrollo de diferentes tipos de robots y sus roles dentro de la sociedad se están expandiendo poco a poco. Los robots dotados de habilidades sociales pretenden ser utilizados para diferentes aplicaciones; por ejemplo, como profesores interactivos y asistentes educativos, para apoyar el manejo de la diabetes en niños, para ayudar a personas mayores con necesidades especiales, como actores interactivos en el teatro o incluso como asistentes en hoteles y centros comerciales.El equipo de investigación RSAIT ha estado trabajando en varias áreas de la robótica, en particular,en arquitecturas de control, exploración y navegación de robots, aprendizaje automático y visión por computador. El trabajo presentado en este trabajo de investigación tiene como objetivo añadir una nueva capa al desarrollo anterior, la capa de interacción humano-robot que se centra en las capacidades sociales que un robot debe mostrar al interactuar con personas, como expresar y percibir emociones, mostrar un alto nivel de diálogo, aprender modelos de otros agentes, establecer y mantener relaciones sociales, usar medios naturales de comunicación (mirada, gestos, etc.),mostrar personalidad y carácter distintivos y aprender competencias sociales.En esta tesis doctoral, tratamos de aportar nuestro grano de arena a las preguntas básicas que surgen cuando pensamos en robots sociales: (1) ¿Cómo nos comunicamos (u operamos) los humanos con los robots sociales?; y (2) ¿Cómo actúan los robots sociales con nosotros? En esa línea, el trabajo se ha desarrollado en dos fases: en la primera, nos hemos centrado en explorar desde un punto de vista práctico varias formas que los humanos utilizan para comunicarse con los robots de una maneranatural. En la segunda además, hemos investigado cómo los robots sociales deben actuar con el usuario.Con respecto a la primera fase, hemos desarrollado tres interfaces de usuario naturales que pretenden hacer que la interacción con los robots sociales sea más natural. Para probar tales interfaces se han desarrollado dos aplicaciones de diferente uso: robots guía y un sistema de controlde robot humanoides con fines de entretenimiento. Trabajar en esas aplicaciones nos ha permitido dotar a nuestros robots con algunas habilidades básicas, como la navegación, la comunicación entre robots y el reconocimiento de voz y las capacidades de comprensión.Por otro lado, en la segunda fase nos hemos centrado en la identificación y el desarrollo de los módulos básicos de comportamiento que este tipo de robots necesitan para ser socialmente creíbles y confiables mientras actúan como agentes sociales. Se ha desarrollado una arquitectura(framework) para robots socialmente interactivos que permite a los robots expresar diferentes tipos de emociones y mostrar un lenguaje corporal natural similar al humano según la tarea a realizar y lascondiciones ambientales.La validación de los diferentes estados de desarrollo de nuestros robots sociales se ha realizado mediante representaciones públicas. La exposición de nuestros robots al público en esas actuaciones se ha convertido en una herramienta esencial para medir cualitativamente la aceptación social de los prototipos que estamos desarrollando. De la misma manera que los robots necesitan un cuerpo físico para interactuar con el entorno y convertirse en inteligentes, los robots sociales necesitan participar socialmente en tareas reales para las que han sido desarrollados, para así poder mejorar su sociabilida

Design and Development of the eBear: A Socially Assistive Robot for Elderly People with Depression

There has been tremendous progress in the field of robotics in the past decade and especially developing humanoid robots with social abilities that can assist human at a socio-emotional level. The objective of this thesis is to develop and study a perceptive and expressive animal-like robot equipped with artificial intelligence in assisting the elderly people with depression. We investigated how social robots can become companions of elderly individuals with depression and improve their mood and increase their happiness and well-being. The robotic platform built in this thesis is a bear-like robot called the eBear. The eBear can show facial expression and head gesture, can understand user\u27s emotion using audio-video sensory inputs and machine learning, can speak and show relatively accurate visual speech, and make dialog with users. the eBear can respond to their questions by querying the Internet, and even encourage them to physically be more active and even perform simple physical exercises. Besides building the robot, the eBear was used in running a pilot study in which seven elderly people with mild to severe depression interacted with the eBear for about 45 minutes three times a week over one month. The results of the study show that interacting with the eBear can increase happiness and mood of these human users as measured by Face Scale, and Geriatric Depression Scale (GDS) score systems. In addition, using Almere Model, it was concluded that the acceptance of the social agent increased over the study period. Videos of the users interaction with the eBear was analyzed and eye gaze, and facial expressions were manually annotated to better understand the behavior changes of users with the eBear. Results of these analyses as well as the exit surveys completed by the users at the end of the study demonstrate that a social robot such as the eBear can be an effective companion for the elderly people and can be a new approach for depression treatment

Cognition, Affects et Interaction

International audienceCet ouvrage rassemble les travaux d’études et de recherche effectués dans le cadre du cours «Cognition, Affects et Interaction » que nous avons animé au 1er semestre 2015-2016. Cette deuxième édition de cours poursuit le principe inauguré en 2014 : aux cours magistraux donnés sur la thématique "Cognition, Interaction & Affects" qui donnent les outils méthodologiques des composantes de l’interaction socio-communicative, nous avons couplé une introduction à la robotique sociale et un apprentissage actif par travail de recherche en binômes. Le principe de ces travaux d’études et de recherche est d’effectuer une recherche bibliographique et de rédiger un article de synthèse sur un aspect de l’interaction homme-robot. Si plusieurs sujets ont été proposés aux étudiants en début d’année, certains binômes ont choisi d’aborder l’interaction avec un angle original qui reflète souvent les trajectoires de formation variés des étudiants en sciences cognitives (ingénierie, sociologie, psychologie, etc). Le résultat dépasse nos espérances : le lecteur trouvera une compilation d’articles argumentés de manière solide, rédigés de manière claire et présentés avec soin. Ces premières «publications» reflètent les capacités singulières de réflexion de cette promotion en nette augmentation par rapport à l’année précédente. Nous espérons que cette série d’ouvrages disponibles sous HAL puisse servir de point d’entrée à des étudiants ou chercheurs intéressés à explorer ce champ de recherches pluri-disciplinaire

Measuring Engagement in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy: A Cross-Cultural Study

During occupational therapy for children with autism, it is often necessary to elicit and maintain engagement for the children to benefit from the session. Recently, social robots have been used for this; however, existing robots lack the ability to autonomously recognize the children’s level of engagement, which is necessary when choosing an optimal interaction strategy. Progress in automated engagement reading has been impeded in part due to a lack of studies on child-robot engagement in autism therapy. While it is well known that there are large individual differences in autism, little is known about how these vary across cultures. To this end, we analyzed the engagement of children (age 3–13) from two different cultural backgrounds: Asia (Japan, n = 17) and Eastern Europe (Serbia, n = 19). The children participated in a 25 min therapy session during which we studied the relationship between the children’s behavioral engagement (task-driven) and different facets of affective engagement (valence and arousal). Although our results indicate that there are statistically significant differences in engagement displays in the two groups, it is difficult to make any causal claims about these differences due to the large variation in age and behavioral severity of the children in the study. However, our exploratory analysis reveals important associations between target engagement and perceived levels of valence and arousal, indicating that these can be used as a proxy for the children’s engagement during the therapy. We provide suggestions on how this can be leveraged to optimize social robots for autism therapy, while taking into account cultural differences.MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists B (grant no. 16763279)Chubu University Grant I (grant no. 27IS04I (Japan))European Union. HORIZON 2020 (grant agreement no. 701236 (ENGAGEME))European Commission. Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (Individual Fellowship)European Commission. Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (grant agreement no. 688835 (DE-ENIGMA)

Measuring Engagement in Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy: A Cross-Cultural Study

During occupational therapy for children with autism, it is often necessary to elicit and maintain engagement for the children to benefit from the session. Recently, social robots have been used for this; however, existing robots lack the ability to autonomously recognize the children’s level of engagement, which is necessary when choosing an optimal interaction strategy. Progress in automated engagement reading has been impeded in part due to a lack of studies on child-robot engagement in autism therapy. While it is well known that there are large individual differences in autism, little is known about how these vary across cultures. To this end, we analyzed the engagement of children (age 3–13) from two different cultural backgrounds: Asia (Japan, n = 17) and Eastern Europe (Serbia, n = 19). The children participated in a 25 min therapy session during which we studied the relationship between the children’s behavioral engagement (task-driven) and different facets of affective engagement (valence and arousal). Although our results indicate that there are statistically significant differences in engagement displays in the two groups, it is difficult to make any causal claims about these differences due to the large variation in age and behavioral severity of the children in the study. However, our exploratory analysis reveals important associations between target engagement and perceived levels of valence and arousal, indicating that these can be used as a proxy for the children’s engagement during the therapy. We provide suggestions on how this can be leveraged to optimize social robots for autism therapy, while taking into account cultural differences.MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists B (grant no. 16763279)Chubu University Grant I (grant no. 27IS04I (Japan))European Union. HORIZON 2020 (grant agreement no. 701236 (ENGAGEME))European Commission. Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (Individual Fellowship)European Commission. Framework Programme for Research and Innovation. Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions (grant agreement no. 688835 (DE-ENIGMA)

Embodied cognition: A field guide

The nature of cognition is being re-considered. Instead of emphasizing formal operations on abstract symbols, the new approach foregrounds the fact that cognition is, rather, a situated activity, and suggests that thinking beings ought therefore be considered first and foremost as acting beings. The essay reviews recent work in Embodied Cognition, provides a concise guide to its principles, attitudes and goals, and identifies the physical grounding project as its central research focus