121 research outputs found

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

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    “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

    In good company? : Perception of movement synchrony of a non-anthropomorphic robot

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    Copyright: © 2015 Lehmann et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.Recent technological developments like cheap sensors and the decreasing costs of computational power have brought the possibility of robotic home companions within reach. In order to be accepted it is vital for these robots to be able to participate meaningfully in social interactions with their users and to make them feel comfortable during these interactions. In this study we investigated how people respond to a situation where a companion robot is watching its user. Specifically, we tested the effect of robotic behaviours that are synchronised with the actions of a human. We evaluated the effects of these behaviours on the robot’s likeability and perceived intelligence using an online video survey. The robot used was Care-O-bot®3, a non-anthropomorphic robot with a limited range of expressive motions. We found that even minimal, positively synchronised movements during an object-oriented task were interpreted by participants as engagement and created a positive disposition towards the robot. However, even negatively synchronised movements of the robot led to more positive perceptions of the robot, as compared to a robot that does not move at all. The results emphasise a) the powerful role that robot movements in general can have on participants’ perception of the robot, and b) that synchronisation of body movements can be a powerful means to enhance the positive attitude towards a non-anthropomorphic robot.Peer reviewe

    The impact of peoples' personal dispositions and personalities on their trust of robots in an emergency scenario

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    Humans should be able to trust that they can safely interact with their home companion robot. However, robots can exhibit occasional mechanical, programming or functional errors. We hypothesise that the severity of the consequences and the timing of a robot's different types of erroneous behaviours during an interaction may have different impacts on users' attitudes towards a domestic robot. First, we investigated human users' perceptions of the severity of various categories of potential errors that are likely to be exhibited by a domestic robot. Second, we used an interactive storyboard to evaluate participants' degree of trust in the robot after it performed tasks either correctly, or with 'small' or 'big' errors. Finally, we analysed the correlation between participants' responses regarding their personality, predisposition to trust other humans, their perceptions of robots, and their interaction with the robot. We conclude that there is correlation between the magnitude of an error performed by a robot and the corresponding loss of trust by the human towards the robot. Moreover we observed that some traits of participants' personalities (conscientiousness and agreeableness) and their disposition of trusting other humans (benevolence) significantly increased their tendency to trust a robot more during an emergency scenario.Peer reviewe

    What are primary school teachers' attitudes toward introversion in students?

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    The existing literature suggests a potential implicit social desirability associated with the extrovert personality and as a result, extroverts are accommodated across various work and educational settings, leading to a better person-environment fit and therefore better wellbeing. This study adopted a social constructionist perspective to explore whether teacher attitude to students described in terms of introversion/extroversion, varied as a function of positive and negative framing, as well as teachers’ own levels of extraversion. This was a quantitative mixed design. Participants were 334 primary school teachers. Teachers were presented with vignettes via a web-based survey, depicting hypothetical children displaying typical, extrovert, or introvert behaviours in the classroom and responded to follow-up questions assessing their attitudes. Teachers also completed a self-report measure of extraversion. The results indicated a relationship between teacher attitude and framing and teacher attitude and student personality type. The findings appear to place the cause of lower attitudinal rating within the teachers’ perception of the student themselves rather than the teachers’ perception of their own ability to teach introvert students. Attitudinal ratings did not vary with teachers’ own level of extraversion. Results are discussed in terms of their educational implications for the social and academic functioning of introvert students. This research provides an original contribution to the field of educational psychology within the Irish context, and offers insights that would benefit the fields of education and psychology, more generally.N

    Views from within a narrative : Evaluating long-term human-robot interaction in a naturalistic environment using open-ended scenarios

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    Open Access 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. Date of acceptance: 16/06/2014This article describes the prototyping of human–robot interactions in the University of Hertfordshire (UH) Robot House. Twelve participants took part in a long-term study in which they interacted with robots in the UH Robot House once a week for a period of 10 weeks. A prototyping method using the narrative framing technique allowed participants to engage with the robots in episodic interactions that were framed using narrative to convey the impression of a continuous long-term interaction. The goal was to examine how participants responded to the scenarios and the robots as well as specific robot behaviours, such as agent migration and expressive behaviours. Evaluation of the robots and the scenarios were elicited using several measures, including the standardised System Usability Scale, an ad hoc Scenario Acceptance Scale, as well as single-item Likert scales, open-ended questionnaire items and a debriefing interview. Results suggest that participants felt that the use of this prototyping technique allowed them insight into the use of the robot, and that they accepted the use of the robot within the scenarioPeer reviewe

    A Review of Personality in Human Robot Interactions

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    Personality has been identified as a vital factor in understanding the quality of human robot interactions. Despite this the research in this area remains fragmented and lacks a coherent framework. This makes it difficult to understand what we know and identify what we do not. As a result our knowledge of personality in human robot interactions has not kept pace with the deployment of robots in organizations or in our broader society. To address this shortcoming, this paper reviews 83 articles and 84 separate studies to assess the current state of human robot personality research. This review: (1) highlights major thematic research areas, (2) identifies gaps in the literature, (3) derives and presents major conclusions from the literature and (4) offers guidance for future research.Comment: 70 pages, 2 figure

    An emotion and memory model for social robots : a long-term interaction

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    In this thesis, we investigate the role of emotions and memory in social robotic companions. In particular, our aim is to study the effect of an emotion and memory model towards sustaining engagement and promoting learning in a long-term interaction. Our Emotion and Memory model was based on how humans create memory under various emotional events/states. The model enabled the robot to create a memory account of user's emotional events during a long-term child-robot interaction. The robot later adapted its behaviour through employing the developed memory in the following interactions with the users. The model also had an autonomous decision-making mechanism based on reinforcement learning to select behaviour according to the user preference measured through user's engagement and learning during the task. The model was implemented on the NAO robot in two different educational setups. Firstly, to promote user's vocabulary learning and secondly, to inform how to calculate area and perimeter of regular and irregular shapes. We also conducted multiple long-term evaluations of our model with children at the primary schools to verify its impact on their social engagement and learning. Our results showed that the behaviour generated based on our model was able to sustain social engagement. Additionally, it also helped children to improve their learning. Overall, the results highlighted the benefits of incorporating memory during child-Robot Interaction for extended periods of time. It promoted personalisation and reflected towards creating a child-robot social relationship in a long-term interaction

    개발 초기 단계에서의 소셜 AI 개인비서 평가 모델 개발

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    학위논문(박사) -- 서울대학교대학원 : 공과대학 산업공학과, 2022.2. 윤명환.This dissertation aims to propose a user evaluation model to evaluate social AI personal assistants in the early stage of product development. Due to the rapid development of personal devices, data generated from personal devices are increasing explosively, and various personal AI services and products using these data are being launched. However, compared to the interest in AI personal assistant products, its market is still immature. In this case, it is important to understand consumer expectations and perceptions deeply and develop a product that can satisfy them to spread the product and allow general consumers to easily accept the product promptly. Accordingly, this dissertation proposes and validates a user evaluation model that can be used in the early stage of product development. Prior to proposing this methodology, main characteristics of social AI personal assistants, the importance of user evaluation in the early stage of product development and the limitations of the existing user evaluation model were investigated in Chapter 2. Various technology acceptance models and evaluation models for social AI personal assistant products have been proposed, evaluation models that can be applied in the initial stage of product development were insufficient, however. Moreover, it was found that commonly used evaluation measures for assessment of hedonic value were much fewer compared to measures for utilitarian value. These were used as starting points of this dissertation. In Chapter 3, the evaluation measures used in previous studies related to social AI personal assistant were collected and carefully reviewed. Through systematic review of 40 studies, the evaluation measures used in the past and limitation of related research were investigated. As a result, it was found that it was not easy to develop a prototype for evaluation, so it was possible to make the most of the products that have already been commercialized. In addition, all evaluation items used in previous studies were collected and used as the basis for the evaluation model to be proposed later. As a result of the analysis, considering the purpose of the social AI personal assistant, the role as supporting the user emotionally through social interaction with the user is important, but it was found that the evaluation measures related to hedonic value that are commonly used were still insufficient. In Chapter 4, evaluation measures that can be used in the initial stage of product development for social AI personal assistant were selected. Selected evaluation measures were used to evaluate three types of social robots and relationship among evaluation factors were induced through this evaluation. A process was proposed to understand to various opinions related to social robots and to derive evaluation items, and a case study was conducted in which a total of 230 people evaluated three social robots concept images using the evaluation items finally selected through this process. As a result, it is shown that consumers’ attitude toward products was built through the utilitarian dimension and the hedonic dimension. In addition, there is positive relationship between ease of use and utility in the utilitarian dimension, and among aesthetic pleasure, attractiveness of personality, affective value in the hedonic dimension. Moreover, it is confirmed that the evaluation model derived from this study showed superior explanatory power compared to the previously proposed technology acceptance model. In Chapter 5, the model was validated again by applying the evaluation measure and the relationship among evaluation factors derived in Chapter 4 to other products. 100 UX experts with expertise in the field of social AI personal assistants and 100 users who use the voice assistant service often, watched two concept videos of the voice assistant service to help users in the onboarding situation of mobile phones and evaluated these concepts. As a result of the evaluation, there is no significant difference in the evaluation results between the UX expert and the real user group, so the structural equation model analysis was conducted using all the data obtained from the UX expert and the real user group. As a result, results similar to those in Chapter 4 are obtained, and it is expected that the model could be generalized to social AI personal assistant products and applied for future research. This dissertation proposes evaluation measure and relationship among evaluation factors that can be applied when conducting user evaluation in the initial stage of social AI personal assistant development. In addition, case studies using social AI personal assistant products and services were conducted to validate it. With the findings of this study, it is expected that researchers who need to conduct user evaluation to clarify product concepts in the early stages of product development will be able to apply evaluation measures effectively. It is expected that the significance of this dissertation will become clearer if further research is conducted comparing the finished product of social AI personal assistants with the video type stimulus in the early stage of development.본 논문은 최근 빠르게 발전하고 있는 social AI personal assistant의 개발 초기 단계에 활용 가능한 사용자 평가 항목을 개발하고 평가 항목 간의 관계를 검증하는 것을 목표로 한다. 개인 디바이스의 발달로 인해, 각 디바이스에서 생성되는 데이터가 폭발적으로 증가하고 있고, 이를 활용한 개인용 AI 서비스 및 제품이 다양하게 제안되고 있다. 하지만 그 관심에 비해, social AI personal assistant 제품의 실제 시장은 아직 성숙하지 않은 단계이다. 이러한 상황에서 제품을 빠르게 확산시키고 일반 소비자들이 쉽게 제품을 수용할 수 있게 하기 위해서는, 소비자의 기대와 인식을 충분히 이해하고 그를 충족시킬 수 있는 제품을 개발하는 것이 중요하다. 이에 따라 본 연구에서는 제품 개발 초기 단계에 활용할 수 있는 사용자 평가 항목을 제안하고 평가 항목 간 관계를 도출하는 것을 목표로 한다. 먼저 2장에서는 social AI personal assistant의 특징, 제품 개발 초기 단계에서 이루어지는 사용자 평가의 중요성 및 기존 사용자 평가 모델의 한계점을 조사하였다. 기존에 기술 수용 모델 및 AI personal assistant 제품의 평가 모델들이 다양하게 제안되어 왔으나, 제품 개발 초기 단계에 활용할 수 있는 평가 모델은 부족하였고, 제품 전반을 평가할 수 있는 평가 모델의 부재로 대부분의 기존 연구에서는 두 가지 이상의 평가 모델을 결합, 수정하여 사용한 것을 알 수 있었다. 3장에서는 AI personal assistant 관련 기존 연구에서 활용된 평가 항목을 검토하였다. 총 40개의 연구를 리뷰하여, 기존에 활용되고 있는 평가 항목의 종류 및 한계점을 알아보았다. 그 결과, 평가를 위한 프로토타입 개발이 쉽지 않기에 이미 상용화된 제품들을 최대한 활용하는 것을 알 수 있었으며, 제품 전반을 평가한 사례는 부족함을 알 수 있었다. 또한 기존 연구들이 사용한 평가 항목을 모두 수집 및 정리하여 이후 제안할 평가 모델의 기반 자료로 활용하였다. 분석 결과, social AI personal assistant의 목적을 고려해보았을 때, 사용자와의 사회적 인터랙션을 통해 사용자의 감정적인 면을 채워주는 역할이 중요하지만, 공통적으로 활용하고 있는 감정적 가치 관련 평가 항목이 부족한 것으로 나타났다. 4장에서는 social AI personal assistant 제품 개발 초기 단계에서 활용 가능한 평가 항목을 수집 및 제안하고, 평가 항목을 활용하여 social robots을 평가한 뒤 이를 통해 평가 항목 간의 관계를 도출하였다. Social robots 관련 의견을 다양하게 청취하고 평가 항목을 도출하는 프로세스를 제안하였으며, 본 프로세스를 통해 최종 선정된 평가 항목을 이용하여, 총 230명이 세 가지 social robots 컨셉 영상을 평가하는 사례 연구를 진행하였다. 평가 결과, 제품에 대한 소비자 태도는 Utilitarian dimension과 Hedonic dimension을 통해 형성되었고, Utilitarian dimension 내 사용성 및 제품 효용성, Hedonic dimension에 포함되는 심미적 만족도, 성격의 매력도, 감성적 가치 각각은 서로 긍정적인 상관관계를 지님을 알 수 있었다. 또한 기존에 제안된 기술 수용 모델 대비 본 연구에서 도출한 평가 모델이 우수한 설명력을 보임을 확인하였다. 5장에서는 4장에서 도출된 평가 모델을 타 제품에 적용하여 모델을 다시 한번 검증하였다. 해당 분야에 전문성을 지닌 UX 전문가 100명 및 음성 비서 서비스를 실제 사용하는 실사용자 100명이, 휴대폰 온보딩 상황에서 사용자를 도와주는 음성 비서 서비스의 컨셉 영상 두 가지를 보고 컨셉에 대한 평가를 진행하였다. 평가 결과 UX 전문가와 실사용자 그룹 간에는 평가 결과에 유의미한 차이를 보이지 않았기 때문에, UX 전문가와 실사용자 그룹에서 얻은 데이터 전체를 활용하여 구조 방정식 모델 분석을 진행하였다. 그 결과 5장과 유사한 수준의 결과를 얻었고, 추후 해당 모델을 social AI personal assistant 제품에 일반화하여 활용할 수 있을 것으로 판단하였다. 본 논문은 social AI personal assistant 관련 제품 및 서비스의 개발 초기 단계에서 사용자 평가를 진행할 때 활용 가능한 평가 항목 및 평가 항목 간의 관계를 도출하였다. 또한 이를 검증하기 위하여 social AI personal assistant 제품 및 서비스를 활용한 사례연구를 진행하였다. 본 연구 결과는 추후 제품 개발 초기 단계에서 제품의 컨셉을 명확히 하기 위한 사용자 평가를 실시해야 하는 연구진이 효율적으로 활용할 수 있을 것으로 기대된다. 추후 이 부분의 검증을 위해, social AI personal assistants의 완제품과 개발 초기 단계의 video type stimulus를 비교하는 추가 연구가 이루어진다면 본 연구의 의미를 보다 명확하게 제시할 수 있을 것으로 생각된다.Chapter 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Background and motivation 1 1.1 Research objectives 5 1.2 Dissertation outline 7 Chapter 2 Literature review 9 2.1 Social AI personal assistant 9 2.2 User centered design process 13 2.3 Technology acceptance models 16 2.4 Evaluation measures for social AI personal assistant 22 2.5 Existing evaluation methodologies for social AI personal assistant 27 Chapter 3 Collection of existing evaluation measures for social AI personal assistants 40 3.1 Background 40 3.2 Methodology 43 3.3 Result 51 3.4 Discussion 60 Chapter 4 Development of an evaluation model for social AI personal assistants 63 4.1 Background 63 4.2 Methodology 66 4.2.1 Developing evaluation measures for social AI personal assistants 68 4.2.2 Conducting user evaluation for social robots 74 4.3 Result 77 4.3.1 Descriptive statistics 77 4.3.2 Hypothesis development and testing 80 4.3.3 Comparison with existing technology acceptance models 88 4.4 Discussion 93 Chapter 5 Verification of an evaluation model with voice assistant services 95 5.1 Background 95 5.2 Methodology 98 5.2.1 Design of evaluation questionnaires for voice assistant services 99 5.2.2 Validation of relationship among evaluation factors 103 5.3 Result 108 5.3.1 Descriptive statistics 108 5.3.2 Hypothesis development and testing 111 5.3.3 Comparison with existing technology acceptance models 118 5.4 Discussion 121 Chapter 6 Conclusion 124 6.1 Summary of this study 124 6.2 Contribution of this study 126 6.3 Limitation and future work 128 Bibliography 129 Appendix A. Evaluation measures for social AI personal assistant collected in Chapter 4 146 Appendix B. Questionnaires for evaluation of social robots 154 Appendix C. Questionnaires for evaluation of voice assistant service 166박

    The Impact of Social Expectation towards Robots on Human-Robot Interactions

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    This work is presented in defence of the thesis that it is possible to measure the social expectations and perceptions that humans have of robots in an explicit and succinct manner, and these measures are related to how humans interact with, and evaluate, these robots. There are many ways of understanding how humans may respond to, or reason about, robots as social actors, but the approach that was adopted within this body of work was one which focused on interaction-specific expectations, rather than expectations regarding the true nature of the robot. These expectations were investigated using a questionnaire-based tool, the University of Hertfordshire Social Roles Questionnaire, which was developed as part of the work presented in this thesis and tested on a sample of 400 visitors to an exhibition in the Science Gallery in Dublin. This study suggested that responses to this questionnaire loaded on two main dimensions, one which related to the degree of social equality the participants expected the interactions with the robots to have, and the other was related to the degree of control they expected to exert upon the robots within the interaction. A single item, related to pet-like interactions, loaded on both and was considered a separate, third dimension. This questionnaire was deployed as part of a proxemics study, which found that the degree to which participants accepted particular proxemics behaviours was correlated with initial social expectations of the robot. If participants expected the robot to be more of a social equal, then the participants preferred the robot to approach from the front, while participants who viewed the robot more as a tool preferred it to approach from a less obtrusive angle. The questionnaire was also deployed in two long-term studies. In the first study, which involved one interaction a week over a period of two months, participant social expectations of the robots prior to the beginning of the study, not only impacted how participants evaluated open-ended interactions with the robots throughout the two-month period, but also how they collaborated with the robots in task-oriented interactions as well. In the second study, participants interacted with the robots twice a week over a period of 6 weeks. This study replicated the findings of the previous study, in that initial expectations impacted evaluations of interactions throughout the long-term study. In addition, this study used the questionnaire to measure post-interaction perceptions of the robots in terms of social expectations. The results from these suggest that while initial social expectations of robots impact how participants evaluate the robots in terms of interactional outcomes, social perceptions of robots are more closely related to the social/affective experience of the interaction

    A Systematic Review of Adaptivity in Human-Robot Interaction

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    As the field of social robotics is growing, a consensus has been made on the design and implementation of robotic systems that are capable of adapting based on the user actions. These actions may be based on their emotions, personality or memory of past interactions. Therefore, we believe it is significant to report a review of the past research on the use of adaptive robots that have been utilised in various social environments. In this paper, we present a systematic review on the reported adaptive interactions across a number of domain areas during Human-Robot Interaction and also give future directions that can guide the design of future adaptive social robots. We conjecture that this will help towards achieving long-term applicability of robots in various social domains
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