9,907 research outputs found
A Constructive Model of Mother-Infant Interaction towards Infantâs Vowel Articulation
Human infants seem to develop to acquire
common phonemes to adults without the capability
to articulate or any explicit knowledge.
To understand such unrevealed human
cognitive development, building a robot
which reproduces such a developmental process
seems effective. It will also contribute to
a design principle for a robot that can communicate
with human beings. This paper hypothesizes
that the caregiverâs parrotry to the
coo of the robot plays an important role in the
phoneme acquisition process based on the implication
from behavioral studies, and propose
a constructive model for it. We validate the
proposed model by examining whether a real
robot can acquire Japanese vowels through interactions
with its caregiver
In good company? : Perception of movement synchrony of a non-anthropomorphic robot
Copyright: Š 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 robotâs likeability and perceived intelligence using an online video survey. The robot used was Care-O-botÂŽ3, 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 participantsâ 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
What are you or who are you? The emergence of social interaction between dog and Unidentified Moving Object (UMO)
Robots offer new possibilities for investigating animal social behaviour. This method enhances controllability and
reproducibility of experimental techniques, and it allows also the experimental separation of the effects of bodily
appearance (embodiment) and behaviour. In the present study we examined dogsâ interactive behaviour in a problem
solving task (in which the dog has no access to the food) with three different social partners, two of which were robots and
the third a human behaving in a robot-like manner. The Mechanical UMO (Unidentified Moving Object) and the Mechanical
Human differed only in their embodiment, but showed similar behaviour toward the dog. In contrast, the Social UMO was
interactive, showed contingent responsiveness and goal-directed behaviour and moved along varied routes. The dogs
showed shorter looking and touching duration, but increased gaze alternation toward the Mechanical Human than to the
Mechanical UMO. This suggests that dogsâ interactive behaviour may have been affected by previous experience with typical
humans. We found that dogs also looked longer and showed more gaze alternations between the food and the Social UMO
compared to the Mechanical UMO. These results suggest that dogs form expectations about an unfamiliar moving object
within a short period of time and they recognise some social aspects of UMOsâ behaviour. This is the first evidence that
interactive behaviour of a robot is important for evoking dogsâ social responsiveness
The implications of embodiment for behavior and cognition: animal and robotic case studies
In this paper, we will argue that if we want to understand the function of
the brain (or the control in the case of robots), we must understand how the
brain is embedded into the physical system, and how the organism interacts with
the real world. While embodiment has often been used in its trivial meaning,
i.e. 'intelligence requires a body', the concept has deeper and more important
implications, concerned with the relation between physical and information
(neural, control) processes. A number of case studies are presented to
illustrate the concept. These involve animals and robots and are concentrated
around locomotion, grasping, and visual perception. A theoretical scheme that
can be used to embed the diverse case studies will be presented. Finally, we
will establish a link between the low-level sensory-motor processes and
cognition. We will present an embodied view on categorization, and propose the
concepts of 'body schema' and 'forward models' as a natural extension of the
embodied approach toward first representations.Comment: Book chapter in W. Tschacher & C. Bergomi, ed., 'The Implications of
Embodiment: Cognition and Communication', Exeter: Imprint Academic, pp. 31-5
Action Selection for Interaction Management: Opportunities and Lessons for Automated Planning
The central problem in automated planning---action selection---is also a
primary topic in the dialogue systems research community, however, the
nature of research in that community is significantly different from that
of planning, with a focus on end-to-end systems and user evaluations. In
particular, numerous toolkits are available for developing speech-based
dialogue systems that include not only a method for representing states and
actions, but also a mechanism for reasoning and selecting the actions,
often combined with a technical framework designed to simplify the task of
creating end-to-end systems. We contrast this situation with that of
automated planning, and argue that the dialogue systems community could
benefit from some of the directions adopted by the planning community, and
that there also exist opportunities and lessons for automated planning
Beyond Gazing, Pointing, and Reaching: A Survey of Developmental Robotics
Developmental robotics is an emerging field located
at the intersection of developmental psychology
and robotics, that has lately attracted
quite some attention. This paper gives a survey of
a variety of research projects dealing with or inspired
by developmental issues, and outlines possible
future directions
Robot Autonomy for Surgery
Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot
operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are
several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing
precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of
biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and
execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and
sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical
teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in
interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In
this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in
research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous
surgical robots
The Future of Work In Cities
The latest report in our City of the Future series examines societal shifts and advancements in technology that are impacting the rapidly changing American workforce. The report outlines solutions to help city leaders plan for the fast-approaching future, while forecasting the economic viability of two distinct sectors â retail and office administration â in which a quarter of Americans are currently employed
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