Explorations in engagement for humans and robots

This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational, collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table

Robotic Rabbit Companions: amusing or a nuisance?

Most of the studies in human-robot interaction involve controlled experiments in a laboratory and only a limited number of studies have put robotic companions into people’s home. Introducing robots into a real-life environment does not only pose many technical challenges but also raises several methodological issues. And even though there might be a gain in ecological validity of the findings, there are other drawbacks that limit the validity of the results. In this paper we reflect on some of these issues based on the experience we gained in the SERA project where a robotic companion was put in the homes of a few people for ten days. We try to draw some general lessons from this experience

A Comparison of Visualisation Methods for Disambiguating Verbal Requests in Human-Robot Interaction

Picking up objects requested by a human user is a common task in human-robot interaction. When multiple objects match the user's verbal description, the robot needs to clarify which object the user is referring to before executing the action. Previous research has focused on perceiving user's multimodal behaviour to complement verbal commands or minimising the number of follow up questions to reduce task time. In this paper, we propose a system for reference disambiguation based on visualisation and compare three methods to disambiguate natural language instructions. In a controlled experiment with a YuMi robot, we investigated real-time augmentations of the workspace in three conditions -- mixed reality, augmented reality, and a monitor as the baseline -- using objective measures such as time and accuracy, and subjective measures like engagement, immersion, and display interference. Significant differences were found in accuracy and engagement between the conditions, but no differences were found in task time. Despite the higher error rates in the mixed reality condition, participants found that modality more engaging than the other two, but overall showed preference for the augmented reality condition over the monitor and mixed reality conditions

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

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe