Drone Communication with Naive Humans

In recent times, drones have become ubiquitous and are tackling problems in such diverse areas as construction, disease control and product delivery. With the rise of drone usage in areas frequented by humans, natural human-drone interaction has become an important phenomenon to study. Designing behaviors for effective drone communication with humans is complex but necessary, especially if drones are to operate in human environments.We present research on drone communication with naive humans, that is, with people interacting with drones who are not themselves participating in whatever task with which the drone is engaged. Drones need to be able to communicate warnings and requests for assistance from humans that they just happen to encounter, and we are attempting to establish design methodologies for creating behaviors that can be interpreted by such naive humans.We have performed a user study (N=21) and presented the results. The results suggest that our approach works and most of the participants can recognize a drone's intentions from its demonstrations

Audience Attention and Emotion in News Filmed with Drones: A Neuromarketing Research

Emotional journalism is being driven by audiovisual technology such as drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, which have demonstrated their usefulness in transforming objective news into news stories from a new visual perspective, facilitating access to dangerous or difficult places. They also allow for greater immersion by an audience that has become an active participant in the news, and they contribute to the storytelling of communication despite the risk to privacy and security that their misuse might entail. The aim of this research is to determine the differences in attention and intensity of the emotions experienced when viewing two pieces of audiovisual news: One was filmed with the technological support of a drone, and the other was produced in the conventional way. The techniques of eye tracking and galvanic skin response were used in 30 Spanish university students. The results suggest that attention was focused on the most spectacular visual elements, although the images filmed with a drone received a higher concentration of attention from the subjects, and this attention was spread throughout the entire image, which demonstrates that drones enhance the effectiveness of panoramic images with natural landscapes. The greatest emotion generated by viewing the images recorded with drones was statistically significant, but it was limited exclusively to these particular scenes, and not to the entire recording of the news

Learning and Mining Player Motion Profiles in Physically Interactive Robogames

Physically-Interactive RoboGames (PIRG) are an emerging application whose aim is to develop robotic agents able to interact and engage humans in a game situation. In this framework, learning a model of players’ activity is relevant both to understand their engagement, as well as to understand specific strategies they adopted, which in turn can foster game adaptation. Following such directions and given the lack of quantitative methods for player modeling in PIRG, we propose a methodology for representing players as a mixture of existing player’s types uncovered from data. This is done by dealing both with the intrinsic uncertainty associated with the setting and with the agent necessity to act in real time to support the game interaction. Our methodology first focuses on encoding time series data generated from player-robot interaction into images, in particular Gramian angular field images, to represent continuous data. To these, we apply latent Dirichlet allocation to summarize the player’s motion style as a probabilistic mixture of different styles discovered from data. This approach has been tested in a dataset collected from a real, physical robot game, where activity patterns are extracted by using a custom three-axis accelerometer sensor module. The obtained results suggest that the proposed system is able to provide a robust description for the player interaction

Chasing Lions: Co-Designing Human-Drone Interaction in Sub-Saharan Africa

Drones are an exciting technology that is quickly being adopted in the global consumer market. Africa has become a center of deployment with the first drone airport established in Rwanda and drones currently being used for applications such as medical deliveries, agriculture, and wildlife monitoring. Despite this increasing presence of drones, there is a lack of research on stakeholders' perspectives from this region. We ran a human-drone interaction user study (N=15) with experts from several sub-Saharan countries using a co-design methodology. Participants described novel applications and identified important design aspects for the integration of drones in this context. Our results highlight the potential of drones to address real world problems, the need for them to be culturally situated, and the importance of considering the social aspects of their interaction with humans. This research highlights the need for diverse perspectives in the human-drone interaction design process.Comment: To be published in the ACM conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '20