Human-centred design methods : developing scenarios for robot assisted play informed by user panels and field trials

Original article can be found at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/ Copyright ElsevierThis article describes the user-centred development of play scenarios for robot assisted play, as part of the multidisciplinary IROMEC1 project that develops a novel robotic toy for children with special needs. The project investigates how robotic toys can become social mediators, encouraging children with special needs to discover a range of play styles, from solitary to collaborative play (with peers, carers/teachers, parents, etc.). This article explains the developmental process of constructing relevant play scenarios for children with different special needs. Results are presented from consultation with panel of experts (therapists, teachers, parents) who advised on the play needs for the various target user groups and who helped investigate how robotic toys could be used as a play tool to assist in the children’s development. Examples from experimental investigations are provided which have informed the development of scenarios throughout the design process. We conclude by pointing out the potential benefit of this work to a variety of research projects and applications involving human–robot interactions.Peer reviewe

BlueSky: Combining Task Planning and Activity-Centric Access Control for Assistive Humanoid Robots

In the not too distant future, assistive humanoid robots will provide versatile assistance for coping with everyday life. In their interactions with humans, not only safety, but also security and privacy issues need to be considered. In this Blue Sky paper, we therefore argue that it is time to bring task planning and execution as a well-established field of robotics with access and usage control in the field of security and privacy closer together. In particular, the recently proposed activity-based view on access and usage control provides a promising approach to bridge the gap between these two perspectives. We argue that humanoid robots provide for specific challenges due to their task-universality and their use in both, private and public spaces. Furthermore, they are socially connected to various parties and require policy creation at runtime due to learning. We contribute first attempts on the architecture and enforcement layer as well as on joint modeling, and discuss challenges and a research roadmap also for the policy and objectives layer. We conclude that the underlying combination of decentralized systems\u27 and smart environments\u27 research aspects provides for a rich source of challenges that need to be addressed on the road to deployment

Multimodal Dialogue Management for Multiparty Interaction with Infants

We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and socially contingent conversations during an early-life critical period for language development (ages 6 to 12 months) as initiated by an artificial agent. As a first step, we focus on creating and maintaining agent-infant engagement that elicits appropriate and socially contingent responses from the baby. Our system includes two agents, a physical robot and an animated virtual human. The system's multimodal perception includes an eye-tracker (measures attention) and a thermal infrared imaging camera (measures patterns of emotional arousal). A dialogue policy is presented that selects individual actions and planned multiparty sequences based on perceptual inputs about the baby's internal changing states of emotional engagement. The present version of the system was evaluated in interaction with 8 babies. All babies demonstrated spontaneous and sustained engagement with the agents for several minutes, with patterns of conversationally relevant and socially contingent behaviors. We further performed a detailed case-study analysis with annotation of all agent and baby behaviors. Results show that the baby's behaviors were generally relevant to agent conversations and contained direct evidence for socially contingent responses by the baby to specific linguistic samples produced by the avatar. This work demonstrates the potential for language learning from agents in very young babies and has especially broad implications regarding the use of artificial agents with babies who have minimal language exposure in early life

Affective Communication for Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review

Research on affective communication for socially assistive robots has been conducted to enable physical robots to perceive, express, and respond emotionally. However, the use of affective computing in social robots has been limited, especially when social robots are designed for children, and especially those with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Social robots are based on cognitiveaffective models, which allow them to communicate with people following social behaviors and rules. However, interactions between a child and a robot may change or be different compared to those with an adult or when the child has an emotional deficit. In this study, we systematically reviewed studies related to computational models of emotions for children with ASD. We used the Scopus, WoS, Springer, and IEEE-Xplore databases to answer different research questions related to the definition, interaction, and design of computational models supported by theoretical psychology approaches from 1997 to 2021. Our review found 46 articles; not all the studies considered children or those with ASD.This research was funded by VRIEA-PUCV, grant number 039.358/202

Robotic ubiquitous cognitive ecology for smart homes

Robotic ecologies are networks of heterogeneous robotic devices pervasively embedded in everyday environments, where they cooperate to perform complex tasks. While their potential makes them increasingly popular, one fundamental problem is how to make them both autonomous and adaptive, so as to reduce the amount of preparation, pre-programming and human supervision that they require in real world applications. The project RUBICON develops learning solutions which yield cheaper, adaptive and efficient coordination of robotic ecologies. The approach we pursue builds upon a unique combination of methods from cognitive robotics, machine learning, planning and agent- based control, and wireless sensor networks. This paper illustrates the innovations advanced by RUBICON in each of these fronts before describing how the resulting techniques have been integrated and applied to a smart home scenario. The resulting system is able to provide useful services and pro-actively assist the users in their activities. RUBICON learns through an incremental and progressive approach driven by the feed- back received from its own activities and from the user, while also self-organizing the manner in which it uses available sensors, actuators and other functional components in the process. This paper summarises some of the lessons learned by adopting such an approach and outlines promising directions for future work

User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments