Comparing video, avatar, and robot mediated communication: Pros and cons of embodiment

Abstract. In recent years, studies have begun on robot conferencing as a new telecommunication medium. In robot conferencing, people talk with a remote conversation partner through teleoperated robots which present the bodily motions of the partner with a physical embodiment. However, the effects of physical embodiment on distant communication had not yet been demonstrated. In this study, to find the effects, we conducted an experiment in which subjects talked with a partner through robots and various existing communication media (e.g. voice, avatar and video chats). As a result, we found that the physical embodiment enhanced social telepresence, i.e., the sense of resembling face-toface interaction. Furthermore, the result implied that physical embodiment built the sense of tension as in the case of a first face-to-face meeting

Periscope: A Robotic Camera System to Support Remote Physical Collaboration

We investigate how robotic camera systems can offer new capabilities to computer-supported cooperative work through the design, development, and evaluation of a prototype system called Periscope. With Periscope, a local worker completes manipulation tasks with guidance from a remote helper who observes the workspace through a camera mounted on a semi-autonomous robotic arm that is co-located with the worker. Our key insight is that the helper, the worker, and the robot should all share responsibility of the camera view--an approach we call shared camera control. Using this approach, we present a set of modes that distribute the control of the camera between the human collaborators and the autonomous robot depending on task needs. We demonstrate the system's utility and the promise of shared camera control through a preliminary study where 12 dyads collaboratively worked on assembly tasks. Finally, we discuss design and research implications of our work for future robotic camera systems that facilitate remote collaboration.Comment: This is a pre-print of the article accepted for publication in PACM HCI and will be presented at CSCW 202

A Comparison of Avatar-, Video-, and Robot-Mediated Interaction on Users’ Trust in Expertise

Communication technologies are becoming increasingly diverse in form and functionality. A central concern is the ability to detect whether others are trustworthy. Judgments of trustworthiness rely, in part, on assessments of non-verbal cues, which are affected by media representations. In this research, we compared trust formation on three media representations. We presented 24 participants with advisors represented by two of the three alternate formats: video, avatar, or robot. Unknown to the participants, one was an expert, and the other was a non-expert. We observed participants’ advice-seeking behavior under risk as an indicator of their trust in the advisor. We found that most participants preferred seeking advice from the expert, but we also found a tendency for seeking robot or video advice. Avatar advice, in contrast, was more rarely sought. Users’ self-reports support these findings. These results suggest that when users make trust assessments, the physical presence of the robot representation might compensate for the lack of identity cues

Accessibility of Health Data Representations for Older Adults: Challenges and Opportunities for Design

Health data of consumer off-the-shelf wearable devices is often conveyed to users through visual data representations and analyses. However, this is not always accessible to people with disabilities or older people due to low vision, cognitive impairments or literacy issues. Due to trade-offs between aesthetics predominance or information overload, real-time user feedback may not be conveyed easily from sensor devices through visual cues like graphs and texts. These difficulties may hinder critical data understanding. Additional auditory and tactile feedback can also provide immediate and accessible cues from these wearable devices, but it is necessary to understand existing data representation limitations initially. To avoid higher cognitive and visual overload, auditory and haptic cues can be designed to complement, replace or reinforce visual cues. In this paper, we outline the challenges in existing data representation and the necessary evidence to enhance the accessibility of health information from personal sensing devices used to monitor health parameters such as blood pressure, sleep, activity, heart rate and more. By creating innovative and inclusive user feedback, users will likely want to engage and interact with new devices and their own data

Social Robot Augmented Telepresence For Remote Assessment And Rehabilitation Of Patients With Upper Extremity Impairment

With the shortage of rehabilitation clinicians in rural areas and elsewhere, remote rehabilitation (telerehab) fills an important gap in access to rehabilitation. We have developed a first of its kind social robot augmented telepresence (SRAT) system --- Flo --- which consists of a humanoid robot mounted onto a mobile telepresence base, with the goal of improving the quality of telerehab. The humanoid has arms, a torso, and a face to play games with and guide patients under the supervision of a remote clinician. To understand the usability of this system, we conducted a survey of hundreds of rehab clinicians. We found that therapists in the United States believe Flo would improve communication, patient motivation, and patient compliance, compared to traditional telepresence for rehab. Therapists highlighted the importance of high-quality video to enable telerehab with their patients and were positive about the usefulness of features which make up the Flo system for enabling telerehab. To compare telepresence interactions with vs without the social robot, we conducted controlled studies, the first to rigorously compare SRAT to classical telepresence (CT). We found that for many SRAT is more enjoyable than and preferred over CT. The results varied by age, motor function, and cognitive function, a novel result. To understand how therapists and patients respond to and use SRAT in the wild over long-term use, we deployed Flo at an elder care facility. Therapists used Flo with their own patients however they deemed best. They developed new ways to use the system and highlighted challenges they faced. To ease the load of performing assessments via telepresence, I constructed a pipeline to predict the motor function of patients using RGBD video of them doing activities via telepresence. The pipeline extracts poses from the video, calculates kinematic features and reachable workspace, and predicts level of impairment using a random forest of decision trees. Finally, I have aggregated our findings over all these studies and provide a path forward to continue the evolution of SRAT

Human Machine Interfaces for Teleoperators and Virtual Environments

In Mar. 1990, a meeting organized around the general theme of teleoperation research into virtual environment display technology was conducted. This is a collection of conference-related fragments that will give a glimpse of the potential of the following fields and how they interplay: sensorimotor performance; human-machine interfaces; teleoperation; virtual environments; performance measurement and evaluation methods; and design principles and predictive models

God-like robots : the semantic overlap between representation of divine and artificial entities

Artificial intelligence and robots may progressively take a more and more prominent place in our daily environment. Interestingly, in the study of how humans perceive these artificial entities, science has mainly taken an anthropocentric perspective (i.e., how distant from humans are these agents). Considering people’s fears and expectations from robots and artificial intelligence, they tend to be simultaneously afraid and allured to them, much as they would be to the conceptualisations related to the divine entities (e.g., gods). In two experiments, we investigated the proximity of representation between artificial entities (i.e., artificial intelligence and robots), divine entities and natural entities (i.e., humans and other animals) at both an explicit (Study 1) and an implicit level (Study 2). In the first study, participants evaluated these entities explicitly on positive and negative attitudes. Hierarchical clustering analysis showed that participants’ representation of artificial intelligence, robots and divine entities were similar, while the representation of humans tended to be associated with that of animals. In the second study, participants carried out a word/non-word decision task including religious semantic-related words and neutral words after the presentation of a masked prime referring to divine entities, artificial entities and natural entities (or a control prime). Results showed that after divine and artificial entity primes, participants were faster to identify religious words as words compared to neutral words arguing for a semantic activation. We conclude that people make sense of the new entities by relying on already familiar entities and in the case of artificial intelligence and robots, people appear to draw parallels to divine entities