The impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets

This paper focuses on issues of interaction with a particular type of mobile information system – virtual pets. It examines the impact of owner age on companionship with virtual pets, and tests the hypothesis that younger virtual pet owners will experience closer companionship with their virtual pet than older owners. This is in response to the marketing stance adopted by virtual pet manufacturers who clearly target younger people as the main consumers of their products. The hypothesis was tested using survey data and companionship was measured using the Comfort from Companion Animals Scale. Support was found for the hypothesis at all definitions of young: there is a highly significant difference between the companionship offered by a virtual pet to young people than that offered to older people. Although this finding generally indicates that virtual pets offer more, in terms of emotional-engagement, to younger people than older people we suggest that much more research in this area is needed in order to better understand the phenomenal commercial success of virtual pets. In addition, there is an abundance of literature examining the benefits of owning real pets. It is possible that a virtual pet might be able to deliver some of these, and given our result, it is likely that virtual pets will be more likely to bring these benefits to young people rather than to old peopl

Towards more humane machines: creating emotional social robots

Robots are now widely used in industrial settings, and today the world has woken up to the impact that they will have in our society. But robots have been limited to repetitive, industrial tasks. However, recent platforms are becoming more secure to operate amongst humans, and research in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is preparing robots for use in schools, public services and eventually everyone’s home. If we aim for a robot flexible enough to work around humans and decide autonomously how to act in complex situations, a notion of morality is needed for their decision making. In this chapter we argue that we can achieve some level of moral decision making in social robots if they are endowed with empathy capabilities. We then discuss how to build artificial empathy in robots, giving some concrete examples of how these implementations can guide the path to creating moral social robots in the future.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

로봇의 신체 언어가 사회적 특성과 인간 유사성에 미치는 영향

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 사회과학대학 심리학과, 2021. 2. Sowon Hahn.The present study investigated the role of robots’ body language on perceptions of social qualities and human-likeness in robots. In experiment 1, videos of a robot’s body language varying in expansiveness were used to evaluate the two aspects. In experiment 2, videos of social interactions containing the body languages in experiment 1 were used to further examine the effects of robots’ body language on these aspects. Results suggest that a robot conveying open body language are evaluated higher on perceptions of social characteristics and human-likeness compared to a robot with closed body language. These effects were not found in videos of social interactions (experiment 2), which suggests that other features play significant roles in evaluations of a robot. Nonetheless, current research provides evidence of the importance of robots’ body language in judgments of social characteristics and human-likeness. While measures of social qualities and human-likeness favor robots that convey open body language, post-experiment interviews revealed that participants expect robots to alleviate feelings of loneliness and empathize with them, which require more diverse body language in addition to open body language. Thus, robotic designers are encouraged to develop robots capable of expressing a wider range of motion. By enabling complex movements, more natural communications between humans and robots are possible, which allows humans to consider robots as social partners.본 연구는 로봇의 신체 언어가 사회적 특성과 인간과의 유사성에 대한 인간의 인식에 미치는 영향을 탐색하였다. 실험 1에서는 로봇의 개방적 신체 언어가 묘사된 영상과 폐쇄적 신체 언어가 묘사된 영상을 통해 이러한 세 가지 측면을 살펴보았다. 실험 2에서는 실험 1의 신체 언어가 포함된 로봇과 사람 간의 상호작용 영상을 활용하여 로봇의 신체 언어가 위 두 가지 측면에 미치는 영향을 탐색하였다. 결과적으로, 사람들은 폐쇄적 신체 언어를 표현하는 로봇에 비해 개방적 신체 언어를 표현하는 로봇을 사회적 특성과 인간과의 유사성에 대한 인식 면에서 더 높게 평가한다는 것을 확인하였다. 그러나 사람과의 상호작용을 담은 영상을 통해서는 이러한 효과가 발견되지 않았으며, 이는 실험 2에 포함된 음성 등의 다른 특징이 로봇에 대한 평가에 중요한 역할을 한다는 것을 시사한다. 그럼에도 불구하고, 본 연구는 로봇의 신체 언어가 사회적 특성 및 인간과의 유사성에 대한 인식의 중요한 요인이 된다는 근거를 제공한다. 사회적 특성과 인간과의 유사성의 척도에서는 개방적 신체 언어를 표현하는 로봇이 더 높게 평가되었지만, 실험 후 인터뷰에서는 로봇이 외로운 감정을 완화하고 공감하기를 기대하는 것으로 나타나 이 상황들에 적절한 폐쇄적 신체 언어 또한 배제할 수 없다고 해석할 수 있다. 이에 따라 본 연구에서는 로봇 디자이너들이 더욱 다양한 범위의 움직임을 표현할 수 있는 로봇을 개발하도록 장려한다. 그렇다면 섬세한 움직임에 따른 자연스러운 의사소통을 통해 인간이 로봇을 사회적 동반자로 인식할 수 있을 것이다.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1. Motivation 1 2. Theoretical Background and Previous Research 3 3. Purpose of Study 12 Chapter 2. Experiment 1 13 1. Objective and Hypotheses 13 2. Methods 13 3. Results 21 4. Discussion 31 Chapter 3. Experiment 2 34 1. Objective and Hypotheses 34 2. Methods 35 3. Results 38 4. Discussion 50 Chapter 4. Conclusion 52 Chapter 5. General Discussion 54 References 60 Appendix 70 국문초록 77Maste

Virtual reality check: a comparison of virtual reality, screen-based, and real world settings as research methods for HRI

To reduce costs and effort, experiments in human-robot interaction can be carried out in Virtual Reality (VR) or in screen-based (SB) formats. However, it is not well examined whether robots are perceived and experienced in the same way in VR and SB as they are in the physical world. This study addresses this topic in a between-subjects experiment, measuring trust and engagement of an interaction with a mobile service robot in a museum scenario. Measures were made in three different settings, either the real world, in VR or in a game-like SB and then compared with an ANOVA. The results indicate, that neither trust nor engagement differ dependent on the experimental setting. The results imply that both VR and SB are eligible ways to explore the interaction with a mobile service robot, if some peculiarities of each medium are taken into account

Towards long-term social child-robot interaction: using multi-activity switching to engage young users

Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI

Stress Levels of CS1 Students During Programming- Measurement and a Cause and Effect Analysis

Stress is a kind of feeling we experience when we are under pressure. Stress is the word that we use when we feel that we are overloaded mentally in our thoughts and wonder whether we can cope with those placed upon us. The effects of stress are different for different people when we take their age, profession, gender and other aspects into consideration. Many studies show that stress in a learning environment impacts learning negatively. In this thesis, the role of stress on students in an introductory programming course (CS1) at CSU has been explored. Introductory programming course has a high attrition rate nationwide. A project was developed to investigate whether students feel stress during programming . This thesis also gives whether that stress is correlated with gender, prior exposure to programming, and math background. A device called Neurosky is used to perform a low-cost EEG (electroencephalogram) by using inexpensive dry sensors to record the brain wave values of the participants in two different tasks. The test results have shown that the students feel stress during programming. A basic metric is used to determine the stress levels of the participants. Later four hypotheses are proposed by observing the comparisons and tested using statistical hypothesis testing to correlate stress with the participant\u27s gender, major, prior programming experience and with their ACT/SAT scores. The test results proved that all these hypotheses are valid with the collected data

ON THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL ROBOTS IN COGNITIVE MULTITASKING AND ITS APPLICATION

[Objective] I clarify the impact of social robots on cognitive tasks, such as driving a car or driving an airplane, and show the possibility of industrial applications based on the principles of social robotics. [Approach] I adopted the MATB, a generalized version of the automobile and airplane operation tasks, as cognitive tasks to evaluate participants' performance on reaction speed, tracking performance, and short-term memory tasks that are widely applicable, rather than tasks specific to a particular situation. Also, as the stimuli from social robots, we used the iCub robot, which has been widely used in social communication research. In the analysis of participants, I not only analyzed performance, but also mental workload using skin conductance and emotional analysis of arousal-valence using facial expressions analysis. In the first experiment, I compared a social robot that use social signals with a nonsocial robot that do not use such signals and evaluated whether social robots affect cognitive task performances. In the second experiment, I focused on vitality forms and compared a calm social robot with an assertive social robot. As analysis methods, I adopted Mann-Whitney's U test for one-pair comparisons, and ART-ANOVA for analysis of variance in repeated task comparisons. Based on the results, I aimed to express vitality forms in a robot head, which is smaller in size and more flexible in placement than a full-body humanoid robot, considering car and airplane cockpit's limited space. For that, I developed a novel eyebrow and I decided to use a wire-driven technique, which is widely used in surgical robots to control soft materials. [Main results] In cognitive tasks such as car drivers and airplane pilots, I clarified the effects of social robots acting social behaviors on task performance, mental workload, and emotions. In addition, I focused on vitality forms, one of the parameters of social behaviors, and clarified the effects of different vitality forms of social robots' behavior on cognitive tasks.In cognitive tasks such as car drivers and airplane pilots, we clarified the effects of social robots acting in social behaviors on task performance, mental workload, and emotions, and showed that the presence of social robots can be effective in cognitive tasks. Furthermore, focusing on vitality forms, one of the parameters of social behaviors, we clarified the effects of different vitality forms of social robots' behaviors on cognitive tasks, and found that social robots with calm behaviors positively affected participants' facial expressions and improved their performance in a short-term memory task. Based on the results, I decided to adopt the configuration of a robot head, eliminating the torso from the social humanoid robot, iCub, considering the possibility of placement in a limited space such as cockpits of car or airplane. In designing the robot head, I developed a novel soft-material eyebrow that can be mounted on the iCub robot head to achieve continuous position and velocity changes, which is an important factor to express vitality forms. The novel eyebrows can express different vitality forms by changing the shape and velocity of the eyebrows, which was conventionally represented by the iCub's torso and arms. [Significance] The results of my research are important achievements that opens up the possibility of applying social robots to non-robotic industries such as automotive and aircraft. In addition, the newly developed soft-material eyebrows' precise shape and velocity changes have opened up new research possibilities in social robotics and social communication research themselves, enabling experiments with complex facial expressions that move beyond Ekman's simple facial expression changes definition, such as, joy, anger, sadness, and pleasure. Thus, the results of this research are one important step in both scientific and industrial applications. [Key-words] social robot, cognitive task, vitality form, robot head, facial expression, eyebro