Human-Like Guide Robot that Proactively Explains Exhibits

We developed an autonomous human-like guide robot for a science museum. Its identifies individuals, estimates the exhibits at which visitors are looking, and proactively approaches them to provide explanations with gaze autonomously, using our new approach called speak-and-retreat interaction. The robot also performs such relation-building behaviors as greeting visitors by their names and expressing a friendlier attitude to repeat visitors. We conducted a field study in a science museum at which our system basically operated autonomously and the visitors responded quite positively. First-time visitors on average interacted with the robot for about 9 min, and 94.74% expressed a desire to interact with it again in the future. Repeat visitors noticed its relation-building capability and perceived a closer relationship with it

Diversity-aware social robots meet people: beyond context-aware embodied AI

The article introduces the concept of "diversity-aware" robotics and discusses the need to develop computational models to embed robots with diversity-awareness: that is, robots capable of adapting and re-configuring their behavior to recognize, respect, and value the uniqueness of the person they interact with to promote inclusion regardless of their age, race, gender, cognitive or physical capabilities, etc. Finally, the article discusses possible technical solutions based on Ontologies and Bayesian Networks, starting from previous experience with culturally competent robots.Comment: The article has been presented during the Roundtable "AI in holistic care and healing practices: the caring encounter beyond COVID-19", Anthropology, AI and the Future of Human Society, 6-10 June 2022, Royal Anthropological Institut

Robot–City Interaction: Mapping the Research Landscape—A Survey of the Interactions Between Robots and Modern Cities

The goal of this work is to describe how robots interact with complex city environments, and to identify the main characteristics of an emerging field that we call Robot--City Interaction (RCI). Given the central role recently gained by modern cities as use cases for the deployment of advanced technologies, and the advancements achieved in the robotics field in recent years, we assume that there is an increasing interest both in integrating robots in urban ecosystems, and in studying how they can interact and benefit from each others. Therefore, our challenge becomes to verify the emergence of such area, to assess its current state and to identify the main characteristics, core themes and research challenges associated with it. This is achieved by reviewing a preliminary body of work contributing to this area, which we classify and analyze according to an analytical framework including a set of key dimensions for the area of RCI. Such review not only serves as a preliminary state-of-the-art in the area, but also allows us to identify the main characteristics of RCI and its research landscape

A Cloud Robotics Solution to Improve Social Assistive Robots for Active and Healthy Aging

Technological innovation in robotics and ICT represents an effective solution to tackle the challenge of providing social sustainable care services for the ageing population. The recent introduction of cloud technologies is opening new opportunities for the provisioning of advanced robotic services based on the cooperation of a number of connected robots, smart environments and devices improved by the huge cloud computational and storage capability. In this context, this paper aims to investigate and assess the potentialities of a cloud robotic system for the provisioning of assistive services for the promotion of active and healthy ageing. The system comprised two different smart environments, located in Italy and Sweden, where a service robot is connected to a cloud platform for the provisioning of localization based services to the users. The cloud robotic services were tested in the two realistic environments to assess the general feasibility of the solution and demonstrate the ability to provide assistive location based services in a multiple environment framework. The results confirmed the validity of the solution but also suggested a deeper investigation on the dependability of the communication technologies adopted in such kind of systems

Signage System for the Navigation of Autonomous Robots in Indoor Environments

In many occasions people need to go to certain places without having any prior knowledge about the environment. This situation may occur when the place is visited for the first time, or even when there is not any available map to situate us. In those cases, the signs of the environment are essential for achieving the goal. The same situation may happen for an autonomous robot. This kind of robots must be capable of solving this problem in a natural way. In order to do that, they must use the resources present in their environment. This paper presents a RFID-based signage system, which has been developed to guide and give important information to an autonomous robot. The system has been implemented in a real indoor environment and it has been successfully proved in the autonomous and social robot Maggie. At the end of the paper some experimental results, carried out inside our university building, are presented.Comunidad de Madri

Self-Organized Multi-Camera Network for a Fast and Easy Deployment of Ubiquitous Robots in Unknown Environments

To bring cutting edge robotics from research centres to social environments, the robotics community must start providing affordable solutions: the costs must be reduced and the quality and usefulness of the robot services must be enhanced. Unfortunately, nowadays the deployment of robots and the adaptation of their services to new environments are tasks that usually require several days of expert work. With this in view, we present a multi-agent system made up of intelligent cameras and autonomous robots, which is easy and fast to deploy in different environments. The cameras will enhance the robot perceptions and allow them to react to situations that require their services. Additionally, the cameras will support the movement of the robots. This will enable our robots to navigate even when there are not maps available. The deployment of our system does not require expertise and can be done in a short period of time, since neither software nor hardware tuning is needed. Every system task is automatic, distributed and based on self-organization processes. Our system is scalable, robust, and flexible to the environment. We carried out several real world experiments, which show the good performance of our proposalThis work was supported by the research projects TIN2009-07737, INCITE08PXIB262202PR, and TIN2012-32262, the grant BES-2010-040813 FPI-MICINN, and by the grant “Consolidation of Competitive Research Groups, Xunta de Galicia ref. 2010/6”S

Teaching robot’s proactive behavior using human assistance

The final publication is available at link.springer.comIn recent years, there has been a growing interest in enabling autonomous social robots to interact with people. However, many questions remain unresolved regarding the social capabilities robots should have in order to perform this interaction in an ever more natural manner. In this paper, we tackle this problem through a comprehensive study of various topics involved in the interaction between a mobile robot and untrained human volunteers for a variety of tasks. In particular, this work presents a framework that enables the robot to proactively approach people and establish friendly interaction. To this end, we provided the robot with several perception and action skills, such as that of detecting people, planning an approach and communicating the intention to initiate a conversation while expressing an emotional status.We also introduce an interactive learning system that uses the person’s volunteered assistance to incrementally improve the robot’s perception skills. As a proof of concept, we focus on the particular task of online face learning and recognition. We conducted real-life experiments with our Tibi robot to validate the framework during the interaction process. Within this study, several surveys and user studies have been realized to reveal the social acceptability of the robot within the context of different tasks.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Using social robots to encourage honest behaviours

This thesis presents a series of studies to understand if robots can promote more honest behaviours from people, when they are tempted to behave dishonestly. In Study 1 we see that a robot just presenting gaze behaviour inhibits cheating, but a robot doing small talk, does not. In Study 2 we see that participants cheated to an equal extent when doing the task in their homes alone or with a video of a robot looking at them. In Study 3 we find that including situation awareness in a robot (showing awareness of the participant behaviour), decreased cheating across the game. In Study 4 we see that priming participants for their relational self-concept does not enhance the situation awareness effect on cheating. In study 5 and 6 we explore participants perceptions, and we see that people consider it wrong to be dishonest towards a robot. However, they would feel low levels of guilt and justify it by the robots’ lack of capabilities, presence, and a human tendency for dishonesty. When prompted to evaluate what other’s/or their own attitudes would be regarding dishonesty, manipulating the caring behaviour of a robot, it shows no effect and people in general think others would be dishonest and hold themselves in a more neutral stance. Interestingly, people that show more negative attitudes towards robots tend to report that others will act more dishonestly as well as themselves. These are important considerations for the development of robots, in the future, to work alongside with humans.Esta tese apresenta uma série de estudos para perceber se os robôs podem promover comportamentos honestos nas pessoas. No Estudo 1 observa-se que um robô que apenas olha para o utilizador, inibe batota, mas um robô que apresenta algum comportamento verbal não tem o mesmo efeito. No estudo 2, vemos que os participantes fazem batota tanto sozinhos, nas suas casas, como na presença de um vídeo de um robô que simplesmente olha. No Estudo 3 incluindo no robô a capacidade de perceber as jogadas dos participantes e reagir a elas, diminui a batota ao longo do jogo. No Estudo 4 a inclusão de um priming para o auto-conceito relacional não aumenta o efeito encontrado no Estudo 3. Finalmente, no Estudo 5 e 6 exploram-se as perceções das pessoas, e verifica-se que consideram errado ser-se desonesto com um robô, mas reportando baixos níveis de culpa. Justificam a desonestidade por: falta de capacidades no robô, falta de presença e a existência de uma tendência humana para a desonestidade. Quando avaliadas as atitudes que os outros teriam ou eles próprios em ser-se desonesto, manipulando o carácter afetivo do robô, não existem efeitos e as pessoas no geral reportam que os outros serão desonestos mantendo-se a si mesmas numa posição neutra. Curiosamente, os que demonstram atitudes mais negativas face a interagirem com robôs, reportam mais desonestidade. Estas são considerações importantes para o desenvolvimento de robôs para colaborarem com humanos no futuro

Perspective Chapter: European Robotics League – Benchmarking through Smart City Robot Competitions

The SciRoc project, started in 2018, is an EU-H2020 funded project supporting the European Robotics League (ERL) and builds on the success of the EU-FP7/H2020 projects RoCKIn, euRathlon, EuRoC and ROCKEU2. The ERL is a framework for robot competitions currently consisting of three challenges: ERL Consumer, ERL Professional and ERL Emergency. These three challenge scenarios are set up in urban environments and converge every two years under one major tournament: the ERL Smart Cities Challenge. Smart cities are a new urban innovation paradigm promoting the use of advanced technologies to improve citizens’ quality of life. A key novelty of the SciRoc project is the ERL Smart Cities Challenge, which aims to show how robots will integrate into the cities of the future as physical agents. The SciRoc Project ran two such ERL Smart Cities Challenges, the first in Milton Keynes, UK (2019) and the second in Bologna, Italy (2021). In this chapter we evaluate the three challenges of the ERL, explain why the SciRoc project introduced a fourth challenge to bring robot benchmarking to Smart Cities and outline the process in conducting a Smart City event under the ERL umbrella. These innovations may pave the way for easier robotic benchmarking in the future