5,358 research outputs found
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
MULTI-MODAL TASK INSTRUCTIONS TO ROBOTS BY NAIVE USERS
This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the design of user-programmable
robots. The objective of the work is to investigate multi-modal unconstrained natural
instructions given to robots in order to design a learning robot. A corpus-centred
approach is used to design an agent that can reason, learn and interact with a human in a
natural unconstrained way. The corpus-centred design approach is formalised and
developed in detail. It requires the developer to record a human during interaction and
analyse the recordings to find instruction primitives. These are then implemented into a
robot. The focus of this work has been on how to combine speech and gesture using
rules extracted from the analysis of a corpus. A multi-modal integration algorithm is
presented, that can use timing and semantics to group, match and unify gesture and
language. The algorithm always achieves correct pairings on a corpus and initiates
questions to the user in ambiguous cases or missing information. The domain of card
games has been investigated, because of its variety of games which are rich in rules and
contain sequences. A further focus of the work is on the translation of rule-based
instructions. Most multi-modal interfaces to date have only considered sequential
instructions. The combination of frame-based reasoning, a knowledge base organised as
an ontology and a problem solver engine is used to store these rules. The understanding
of rule instructions, which contain conditional and imaginary situations require an agent
with complex reasoning capabilities. A test system of the agent implementation is also
described. Tests to confirm the implementation by playing back the corpus are
presented. Furthermore, deployment test results with the implemented agent and human
subjects are presented and discussed. The tests showed that the rate of errors that are
due to the sentences not being defined in the grammar does not decrease by an
acceptable rate when new grammar is introduced. This was particularly the case for
complex verbal rule instructions which have a large variety of being expressed
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