An explorative study on robotics for supporting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder during clinical procedures

This short report presents a small-scale explorative study about children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interaction with robots during clinical interactions. This is part of an ongoing project, which aims at defining a robotic service for supporting children with developmental disabilities and increase the efficiency of routine procedures that may create distress, e.g.having blood taken or an orthopaedic plaster cast applied. Five children with confirmed diagnoses of ASD interacted with two social robots: the small humanoid NAO and the pet-like MiRo. The encounters mixed play activities with a simulated clinical procedure. We included parents/carers in the interaction to ensure the child was comfortable and at ease. The results of video analysis and parents' feedback confirm possible benefits of the physical presence of robots to reduce children’s anxiety and increase compliance with instructions. Parents/carers convincingly support the introduction of robots in hospital procedures to their help children

Design patterns for an interactive storytelling robot to support children's engagement and agency

In this paper we specify and validate three interaction design patterns for an interactive storytelling experience with an autonomous social robot. The patterns enable the child to make decisions about the story by talking with the robot, reenact parts of the story together with the robot, and recording self-made sound effects. The design patterns successfully support children's engagement and agency. A user study (N = 27, 8-10 y.o.) showed that children paid more attention to the robot, enjoyed the storytelling experience more, and could recall more about the story, when the design patterns were employed by the robot during storytelling. All three aspects are important features of engagement. Children felt more autonomous during storytelling with the design patterns and highly appreciated that the design patterns allowed them to express themselves more freely. Both aspects are important features of children's agency. Important lessons we have learned are that reducing points of confusion and giving the children more time to make themselves heard by the robot will improve the patterns efficiency to support engagement and agency. Allowing children to pick and choose from a diverse set of stories and interaction settings would make the storytelling experience more inclusive for a broader range of children

Automatic Assessment and Learning of Robot Social Abilities

One of the key challenges of current state-of-the-art robotic deployments in public spaces, where the robot is supposed to interact with humans, is the generation of behaviors that are engaging for the users. Eliciting engagement during an interaction, and maintaining it after the initial phase of the interaction, is still an issue to be overcome. There is evidence that engagement in learning activities is higher in the presence of a robot, particularly if novel [1], but after the initial engagement state, long and non-interactive behaviors are detrimental to the continued engagement of the users [5, 16]. Overcoming this limitation requires to design robots with enhanced social abilities that go past monolithic behaviours and introduces in-situ learning and adaptation to the specific users and situations. To do so, the robot must have the ability to perceive the state of the humans participating in the interaction and use this feedback for the selection of its own actions over time [27]

Affect and embodiment in HRI

Both affect and embodiment have enormous importance for the field of HRI, which is increasingly interested in how the manifestation of the forms of robot embodiment influences the emotional state of the user. Designing and evaluating the affectivity of the robot body has become a frontier topic in HRI. To date, this is one of the few HRI workshops dedicated to affective robotics, and we propose three objectives: to identify relevant questions for the design of robotic bodies with high affective qualities; to consider cross-currents in ethical, philosophical, and methodological questions in studying emotional relations between humans and robots; and to foster synergies among designers, engineers, and social scientists in affective robotics

Challenges of a Real-World HRI Study with Non-Native English Speakers

Real-world studies allow for testing the limits of HRI systems and observing how people react to failures. We developed a fully autonomous personalised barista robot and deployed the robot on an international student campus for five days. We experienced several challenges, the most important one being speech recognition failures due to foreign accents. Nonetheless, these failures showed a different perspective on HRI, and we demonstrate how personalisation can overcome a negative user experience

From Psychological Intention Recognition Theories to Adaptive Theory of Mind for Robots

Progress in robots' application to everyday scenarios has increased the interest in human-robot interaction (HRI) research. However, robots' limited social skills are associated with decreased humans' positive attitude during HRI. Here, we put forward the idea of developing adaptive Theory of Mind (ToM) model-based systems for social robotics, able to deal with new situations and interact with different users in new tasks. Therefore, we grouped current research from developmental psychology debating the computational processes underlying ToM for HRI strategy development. Defining a model describing adaptive ToM processes may in fact aid the development of adaptive robotic architectures for more flexible and successful HRI. Finally, we hope with this report to both further promote the cross-talk between the fields of developmental psychology and robotics and inspire future investigations in this direction

Intuitive programming with remotely instructed robots inside future gloveboxes

Our research aims at facilitating the design of ’Remotely Instructed Robots’ for future glove-boxes in the nuclear industry. The two main features of such systems are: (1) They can automatically model the working environment and relay that information to the operator in virtual reality (VR). (2) They can receive instructions from the operator that are executed by the robot. However, the deficiency of these kind of systems is that they heavily rely on knowledge of expert programmers when the robot’s capabilities or hardware are to be reconfigured, altered or upgraded. This late breaking report proposes to introduce a third important advancement on remotely instructed robots: (3) Intuitive programming modifications by operators who are non-programmers but have basic knowledge of hardware, and most importantly, have experience of the weaknesses in particular handling tasks

Security Risks of Social Robots Used to Persuade and Manipulate

Earlier research has shown that robots can provoke social responses in people, and that robots often elicit compliance. In this paper we discuss three proof of concept studies in which we explore the possibility of robots being hacked and taken over by others with the explicit purpose of using the robot's social capabilities. Three scenarios are explored: gaining access to secured areas, extracting sensitive and personal information, and convincing people to take unsafe action. We find that people are willing to do these tasks, and that social robots tend to be trusted, even in situations that would normally cause suspicion

Sprout: Designing Expressivity for Robots Using Fiber-Embedded Actuator

In this paper, we explore how techniques from soft robotics can help create a new form of robot expression. We present Sprout, a soft expressive robot that conveys its internal states by changing its body shape. Sprout can extend, bend, twist, and expand using fiber-embedded actuators integrated into its construction. These deformations enable Sprout to express its internal states, for example, by expanding to express anger and bending its body sideways to express curiosity. Through two user studies, we investigated how users interpreted Sprout's expressions, their perceptions of Sprout, and their expectations from future iterations of Sprout's design. We argue that the use of soft actuators opens a novel design space for robot expressions to convey internal states, emotions, and intent.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figure