Bipedal humanoid robot that makes humans laugh with use of the method of comedy and affects their psychological state actively

This paper describes the bipedal humanoid robot that makes human laugh with its whole body expression and affect human’s psychological state. In order to realize "Social interaction" between human and robot, the robot has to affect human’s psychological state actively. We focused on "laugh" because it can be thought as a typical example for researching "Social interaction". Looking through a Japanese comedy style called "manzai" or the art of conversation, we picked out several methods for making human laugh. Then we made several skits with the advice of comedians, and made the whole body humanoid robot perform them. Results of experimental evaluation with these skits shows that the robot’s behavior made subjects laugh and change their psychological state seen as a decrease of "Depression" and "Anger"

Communication Robot: Animating a Technological Solution in Twenty-First Century Japan

Present-day Japan is marked by two associated problems: the social problem of communication and connection and the economic problem of labor shortage. The social problem of connection, which emerged in the 1990s, was originally thought to be centered on disconnected, lonely, anxious, and sometimes violent youth, but by 2010 the middle-aged and elderly were also found to be suffering from isolation and loneliness, as seen by the increase in the number of single-person households, declining marriage rate, and the resultant declining birthrate. The latter demographic reduction, combined with the aging population, creates population decline that directly causes an insufficient labor force. Because this labor shortage is understood as a serious problem in Japan, the government is trying to implement a variety of solutions, one of which is to increase robotics. In 2014, a Japanese telecommunications conglomerate announced the release of a friendly communication robot, Pepper, as the all-in-one technological solution to both of these problems. This dissertation examines how friendly communication robots like Pepper make sense as a solution to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortage in contemporary Japan. The acceptance of this solution is rooted in the historical development of the notion of technology in Japan (from the early modern Tokugawa to the postwar eras), combined with the postwar popular cultural development of the figure of a robot in manga and anime. Accordingly, Japanese society is both familiar and comfortable with the widely shared image of the robot whose defining quality is its convincing quality of humanity. Communication robots—specifically, the communication robot Pepper—are thus developed as both as technological objects and animated characters in mass media; their presence in the daily lives of humans bridges the limited present technologies with the future potential imagined in popular culture through expectation management. For most of the general public, Pepper exists as an animated character, modeled through its interactions with celebrities on TV. In addition, owner–users of Pepper, and other people in business and social settings, interact with Pepper as an animated character whose personality [kyara] is modeled on the personalities of popular media stars. Such playful and entertaining interactions reflect the cultural logic of Japanese TV production and become a playful buffer [asobi] for the Japanese to face problems, but may not provide real solutions to the double problem of waning sociality and labor shortages. Nonetheless, the material presence of Pepper is capable of functioning as a reflexive tool for app developers (many of whom are also owners/adopters) to reflect on their own biases and assumptions about communication, culture, and technology. By oscillating between the established animated character and the blank machine, Pepper functions as a medium by which people engage in meaning-making, negotiating the solutions to the problems. Doctor of Philosoph

Toward Machine Learning-Enabled Adaptivity for Humorous Robots

Social robots benefit from a sense of humor, which requires the ability to recognize and adapt to human responses during playful interactions. Past work on humorous robots has classified audience responses with audio-based and preliminary visual-based methods following the joke punchline. Building on this progress, we conducted a survey of 20 human comedians to inform the design of robotic comedians. Using the comedians’ insights, we designed an audio-based machine learning pipeline to detect joke enjoyment while the joke setup is being read as well as following the punchline. Furthermore, we used the Facial Action Coding System as the basis for a machine learning pipeline to detect joke enjoyment using participant faces in one-on-one interactions. Finally, we designed and evaluated a new robotic comedian system using the visual classifier. In this work, we present the comedian survey findings, joke enjoyment classification methods, and insights from the deployment of our robotic comedian. This work’s contributions to humor as a robotic social skill support the likability and acceptance of social robots

Towards a Cognitive Architecture for Socially Adaptive Human-Robot Interaction

People have a natural predisposition to interact in an adaptive manner with others, by instinctively changing their actions, tones and speech according to the perceived needs of their peers. Moreover, we are not only capable of registering the affective and cognitive state of our partners, but over a prolonged period of interaction we also learn which behaviours are the most appropriate and well-suited for each one of them individually. This universal trait that we share regardless of our different personalities is referred to as social adaptation (adaptability). Humans are always capable of adapting to the others although our personalities may influence the speed and efficacy of the adaptation. This means that in our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex and personalized interactions with our peers. Carrying this ability to personalize to human-robot interaction (HRI) is highly desirable since it would provide user-personalized interaction, a crucial element in many HRI scenarios - interactions with older adults, assistive or rehabilitative robotics, child-robot interaction (CRI), and many others. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and affective states and be capable of continuously adapting its behaviour to them. Equipping a robot with these functionalities however is not a straightforward task. A robust approach for solving this is implementing a framework for the robot supporting social awareness and adaptation. In other words, the robot needs to be equipped with the basic cognitive functionalities, which would allow the robot to learn how to select the behaviours that would maximize the pleasantness of the interaction for its peers, while being guided by an internal motivation system that would provide autonomy to its decision-making process. The goal of this research was threefold: attempt to design a cognitive architecture supporting social HRI and implement it on a robotic platform; study how an adaptive framework of this kind would function when tested in HRI studies with users; and explore how including the element of adaptability and personalization in a cognitive framework would in reality affect the users - would it bring an additional richness to the human-robot interaction as hypothesized, or would it instead only add uncertainty and unpredictability that would not be accepted by the robot`s human peers? This thesis covers the work done on developing a cognitive framework for human-robot interaction; analyzes the various challenges of implementing the cognitive functionalities, porting the framework on several robotic platforms and testing potential validation scenarios; and finally presents the user studies performed with the robotic platforms of iCub and MiRo, focused on understanding how a cognitive framework behaves in a free-form HRI context and if humans can be aware and appreciate the adaptivity of the robot. In summary, this thesis had the task of approaching the complex field of cognitive HRI and attempt to shed some light on how cognition and adaptation develop from both the human and the robot side in an HRI scenario

Procedural animation: towards studio solutions for believability

This thesis sets out to investigate the understanding of the relationship between key-frame movement performances and procedural animation. It is geared towards building a theory of practice that would help develop a succinct method for generating believable character animation using procedural animation. This research places an emphasis on a practical aproach to the theory of animation and movement, and investigates the historical development of character animation and the notion of believability. It uses Laban Movement Analysis as a method in the application of procedural animation. The study seeks to address the following objectives: (1) To examine what areas of procedural animation may enhance the believability of a key-framed movement performance; (2) To identify the areas of procedural animation that are or could be used within professional studio practice; (3) To examine the potential of procedural animation to help develop convincing and life-like character movements; (4) To identify where and how a keyframed character movement can be enhanced procedurally; (5) To carry out empirical studies in order to analyse the effects and possible benefits of procedural enhancements on a key-framed movement

Bipedal humanoid robot that makes humans laugh with use of the method of comedy and affects their psychological state actively

This paper describes the bipedal humanoid robot that makes human laugh with its whole body expression and affect human’s psychological state. In order to realize "Social interaction" between human and robot, the robot has to affect human’s psychological state actively. We focused on "laugh" because it can be thought as a typical example for researching "Social interaction". Looking through a Japanese comedy style called "manzai" or the art of conversation, we picked out several methods for making human laugh. Then we made several skits with the advice of comedians, and made the whole body humanoid robot perform them. Results of experimental evaluation with these skits shows that the robot’s behavior made subjects laugh and change their psychological state seen as a decrease of "Depression" and "Anger"

Persuasive Intelligence: On the Construction of Rhetor-Ethical Cognitive Machines

This work concerns the rhetorical and moral agency of machines, offering paths forward in machine ethics as well as problematizing the issue through the development and use of an interdisciplinary framework informed by rhetoric, philosophy of mind, media studies and historical narrative. I argue that cognitive machines of the past as well as those today, such as rapidly improving autonomous vehicles, are unable to make moral decisions themselves foremost because a moral agent must first be a rhetorical agent, capable of persuading and of being persuaded. I show that current machines, artificially intelligent or otherwise, and especially digital computers, are primarily concerned with control, whereas persuasive behavior requires an understanding of possibility. Further, this dissertation connects rhetorical agency and moral agency (what I call a rhetor-ethical constitution) by way of the Heraclitean notion of syllapsis ( grasping ), a mode of cognition that requires an agent to practice analysis and synthesis at once, cognizing the whole and its parts simultaneously. This argument does not, however, indicate that machines are devoid of ethical or rhetorical activity or future agency. To the contrary, the larger purpose of developing this theoretical framework is to provide avenues of research, exploration and experimentation in machine ethics and persuasion that have been overlooked or ignored thus far by adhering to restricted disciplinary programs; and, given the ontological nature of the ephemeral binary that drives digital computation, I show that at least in principle, computers share the syllaptic operating principle required for rhetor-ethical decisions and action

Whoever Said Change Was Good: The Transforming Body of the Disney Villainess

This dissertation examines female figures in Disney animation through the lens of Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), a system for observing and articulating movement qualities. Drawing from six major films released between 1937 and 2010, I focus my inquiry on how the bodies and movement of Disneys villainesses reflect and/or perpetuate cultural imaginaries of women. I identify the influence of several cultural tropes of femininity, including fairy-tale archetypes, ballet conventions, and the Hollywood femme fatale, and explore how they constellate social understandings of age, beauty, and desirability. Coalescing around the theme of physical transformation, the study investigates how consistent movement patterns both support character animation and reflect gender ideologies encoded in the bodies of these wicked women. Through a methodology grounded in LMA and drawing from dance studies, feminist theory, and Disney scholarship, I interrogate popular conceptions of women and evil, articulate how movement contributes to cultural meaning, and demonstrate LMAs value to cultural analysis and animation

Animation & Cartoons

An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot. Animation is the optical illusion of motion created by the consecutive display of images of static elements. In film and video production, this refers to techniques by which each frame of a film or movie is produced individually. Computer animation is the art of creating moving images via the use of computers. It is a subfield of computer graphics and animation. Anime is a medium of animation originating in Japan, with distinctive character and background aesthetics that visually set it apart from other forms of animation. An animated cartoon is a short, hand-drawn (or made with computers to look similar to something hand-drawn) moving picture for the cinema, TV or computer screen, featuring some kind of story or plot (even if it is a very short one). Manga is the Japanese word for comics and print cartoons. Outside of Japan, it usually refers specifically to Japanese comics. Special effects (abbreviated SPFX or SFX) are used in the film, television, and entertainment industry to visualize scenes that cannot be achieved by normal means, such as space travel. Stop motion is a generic gereral term for an animation technique which makes static objects appear to move