Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe

On the Integration of Adaptive and Interactive Robotic Smart Spaces

© 2015 Mauro Dragone et al.. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License. (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)Enabling robots to seamlessly operate as part of smart spaces is an important and extended challenge for robotics R&D and a key enabler for a range of advanced robotic applications, such as AmbientAssisted Living (AAL) and home automation. The integration of these technologies is currently being pursued from two largely distinct view-points: On the one hand, people-centred initiatives focus on improving the user’s acceptance by tackling human-robot interaction (HRI) issues, often adopting a social robotic approach, and by giving to the designer and - in a limited degree – to the final user(s), control on personalization and product customisation features. On the other hand, technologically-driven initiatives are building impersonal but intelligent systems that are able to pro-actively and autonomously adapt their operations to fit changing requirements and evolving users’ needs,but which largely ignore and do not leverage human-robot interaction and may thus lead to poor user experience and user acceptance. In order to inform the development of a new generation of smart robotic spaces, this paper analyses and compares different research strands with a view to proposing possible integrated solutions with both advanced HRI and online adaptation capabilities.Peer reviewe

Comparing human robot interaction scenarios using live and video based methods: towards a novel methodological approach

This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.---- Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE. DOI : 10.1109/AMC.2006.1631754This paper presents results of a pilot study that investigated whether people’s perceptions from live and video HRI trials were comparable. Subjects participated in a live HRI trial and videotaped HRI trials in which the scenario for both trials was identical, and involved a robot fetching an object using different approach directions. Results of the trials indicated moderate to high levels of agreement for subjects’ preferences, and opinions for both the live and video based HRI trials. This methodology is in its infancy and should not be seen as a replacement for live trials. However, our results indicate that for certain HRI scenarios videotaped trials do have potential as a technique for prototyping, testing, developing HRI scenarios, and testing methodologies for use in definitive live trials

Integrating Constrained Experiments in Long-term Human-Robot Interaction using Task– and Scenario–based Prototyping

© 2015 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis© Dag Sverre Syrdal, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Kheng Lee Koay, and Wan Ching Ho. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested.In order to investigate how the use of robots may impact everyday tasks, 12 participants interacted with a University of Hertfordshire Sunflower robot over a period of 8 weeks in the university’s Robot House.. Participants performed two constrained tasks, one physical and one cognitive , 4 times over this period. Participant responses were recorded using a variety of measures including the System Usability Scale and the NASA Task Load Index . The use of the robot had an impact on the experienced workload of the participants differently for the two tasks, and this effect changed over time. In the physical task, there was evidence of adaptation to the robot’s behaviour. For the cognitive task, the use of the robot was experienced as more frustrating in the later weeks.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Studies on user control in ambient intelligent systems

People have a deeply rooted need to experience control and be effective in interactions with their environments. At present times, we are surrounded by intelligent systems that take decisions and perform actions for us. This should make life easier, but there is a risk that users experience less control and reject the system. The central question in this thesis is whether we can design intelligent systems that have a degree of autonomy, while users maintain a sense of control. We try to achieve this by giving the intelligent system an 'expressive interface’: the part that provides information to the user about the internal state, intentions and actions of the system. We examine this question both in the home and the work environment.We find the notion of a ‘system personality’ useful as a guiding principle for designing interactions with intelligent systems, for domestic robots as well as in building automation. Although the desired system personality varies per application, in both domains a recognizable system personality can be designed through expressive interfaces using motion, light, sound, and social cues. The various studies show that the level of automation and the expressive interface can influence the perceived system personality, the perceived level of control, and user’s satisfaction with the system. This thesis shows the potential of the expressive interface as an instrument to help users understand what is going on inside the system and to experience control, which might be essential for the successful adoption of the intelligent systems of the future.<br/

Hospital robot at work: something alien or an intelligent colleague?

LIRE

Supporting active and healthy aging with advanced robotics integrated in smart environment

The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions

Avoiding the uncanny valley : robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-007-9058-3This article presents the results of video-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials which investigated people’s perceptions of different robot appearances and associated attention-seeking features and behaviors displayed by robots with different appearance and behaviors. The HRI trials studied the participants’ preferences for various features of robot appearance and behavior, as well as their personality attributions towards the robots compared to their own personalities. Overall, participants tended to prefer robots with more human-like appearance and attributes. However, systematic individual differences in the dynamic appearance ratings are not consistent with a universal effect. Introverts and participants with lower emotional stability tended to prefer the mechanical looking appearance to a greater degree than other participants. It is also shown that it is possible to rate individual elements of a particular robot’s behavior and then assess the contribution, or otherwise, of that element to the overall perception of the robot by people. Relating participants’ dynamic appearance ratings of individual robots to independent static appearance ratings provided evidence that could be taken to support a portion of the left hand side of Mori’s theoretically proposed ‘uncanny valley’ diagram. Suggestions for future work are outlined.Peer reviewe

Artificial Intelligence: Robots, Avatars, and the Demise of the Human Mediator

Published in cooperation with the American Bar Association Section of Dispute Resolutio

Investigating Human Perceptions of Trust and Social Cues in Robots for Safe Human-Robot Interaction in Human-oriented Environments

As robots increasingly take part in daily living activities, humans will have to interact with them in domestic and other human-oriented environments. This thesis envisages a future where autonomous robots could be used as home companions to assist and collaborate with their human partners in unstructured environments without the support of any roboticist or expert. To realise such a vision, it is important to identify which factors (e.g. trust, participants’ personalities and background etc.) that influence people to accept robots’ as companions and trust the robots to look after their well-being. I am particularly interested in the possibility of robots using social behaviours and natural communications as a repair mechanism to positively influence humans’ sense of trust and companionship towards the robots. The main reason being that trust can change over time due to different factors (e.g. perceived erroneous robot behaviours). In this thesis, I provide guidelines for a robot to regain human trust by adopting certain human-like behaviours. I can expect that domestic robots will exhibit occasional mechanical, programming or functional errors, as occurs with any other electrical consumer devices. For example, these might include software errors, dropping objects due to gripper malfunctions, picking up the wrong object or showing faulty navigational skills due to unclear camera images or noisy laser scanner data respectively. It is therefore important for a domestic robot to have acceptable interactive behaviour when exhibiting and recovering from an error situation. In this context, several open questions need to be addressed regarding both individuals’ perceptions of the errors and robots, and the effects of these on people’s trust in robots. As a first step, I investigated how the severity of the consequences and the timing of a robot’s different types of erroneous behaviours during an interaction may have different impact on users’ attitudes towards a domestic robot. I concluded that there is a correlation between the magnitude of an error performed by the robot and the corresponding loss of trust of the human in the robot. In particular, people’s trust was strongly affected by robot errors that had severe consequences. This led us to investigate whether people’s awareness of robots’ functionalities may affect their trust in a robot. I found that people’s acceptance and trust in the robot may be affected by their knowledge of the robot’s capabilities and its limitations differently according the participants’ age and the robot’s embodiment. In order to deploy robots in the wild, strategies for mitigating and re-gaining people’s trust in robots in case of errors needs to be implemented. In the following three studies, I assessed if a robot with awareness of human social conventions would increase people’s trust in the robot. My findings showed that people almost blindly trusted a social and a non-social robot in scenarios with non-severe error consequences. In contrast, people that interacted with a social robot did not trust its suggestions in a scenario with a higher risk outcome. Finally, I investigated the effects of robots’ errors on people’s trust of a robot over time. The findings showed that participants’ judgement of a robot is formed during the first stage of their interaction. Therefore, people are more inclined to lose trust in a robot if it makes big errors at the beginning of the interaction. The findings from the Human-Robot Interaction experiments presented in this thesis will contribute to an advanced understanding of the trust dynamics between humans and robots for a long-lasting and successful collaboration