Socially assistive robots : the specific case of the NAO

Numerous researches have studied the development of robotics, especially socially assistive robots (SAR), including the NAO robot. This small humanoid robot has a great potential in social assistance. The NAO robot’s features and capabilities, such as motricity, functionality, and affective capacities, have been studied in various contexts. The principal aim of this study is to gather every research that has been done using this robot to see how the NAO can be used and what could be its potential as a SAR. Articles using the NAO in any situation were found searching PSYCHINFO, Computer and Applied Sciences Complete and ACM Digital Library databases. The main inclusion criterion was that studies had to use the NAO robot. Studies comparing it with other robots or intervention programs were also included. Articles about technical improvements were excluded since they did not involve concrete utilisation of the NAO. Also, duplicates and articles with an important lack of information on sample were excluded. A total of 51 publications (1895 participants) were included in the review. Six categories were defined: social interactions, affectivity, intervention, assisted teaching, mild cognitive impairment/dementia, and autism/intellectual disability. A great majority of the findings are positive concerning the NAO robot. Its multimodality makes it a SAR with potential

Psychophysiological responses to eye contact with a humanoid robot: Impact of perceived intentionality

Eye contact with a social robot has been shown to elicit similar psychophysiological responses to eye contact with another human. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that the attention- and affect-related psychophysiological responses differentiate between direct (toward the observer) and averted gaze mainly when viewing embodied faces that are capable of social interaction, whereas pictorial or pre-recorded stimuli have no such capability. It has been suggested that genuine eye contact, as indicated by the differential psychophysiological responses to direct and averted gaze, requires a feeling of being watched by another mind. Therefore, we measured event-related potentials (N170 and frontal P300) with EEG, facial electromyography, skin conductance, and heart rate deceleration responses to seeing a humanoid robot's direct versus averted gaze, while manipulating the impression of the robot's intentionality. The results showed that the N170 and the facial zygomatic responses were greater to direct than to averted gaze of the robot, and independent of the robot's intentionality, whereas the frontal P300 responses were more positive to direct than to averted gaze only when the robot appeared intentional. The study provides further evidence that the gaze behavior of a social robot elicits attentional and affective responses and adds that the robot's seemingly autonomous social behavior plays an important role in eliciting higher-level socio-cognitive processing.Peer reviewe

Mood contagion of robot body language in human robot interaction

The aim of our work is to design bodily mood expressions of humanoid robots for interactive settings that can be recognized by users and have (positive) effects on people who interact with the robots. To this end, we develop a parameterized behavior model for humanoid robots to express mood through body language. Different settings of the parameters, which control the spatial extent and motion dynamics of a behavior, result in different behavior appearances expressing different moods. In this study, we applied the behavior model to the gestures of the imitation game performed by the NAO robot to display either a positive or a negative mood. We address the question whether robot mood displayed simultaneously with the execution of functional behaviors in a task can (a) be recognized by participants and (b) produce contagion effects. Mood contagion is an automatic mechanism that induces a congruent mood state by means of the observation of another person’s emotional expression. In addition, we varied task difficulty to investigate how the task load mediates the effects. Our results show that participants are able to differentiate between positive and negative robot mood and they are able to recognize the behavioral cues (the parameters) we manipulated. Moreover, self-reported mood matches the mood expressed by the robot in the easy task condition. Additional evidence for mood contagion is provided by the fact that we were able to replicate an expected effect of negative mood on task performance: in the negative mood condition participants performed better on difficult tasks than in the positive mood condition, even though participants’ self-reported mood did not match that of the robot.Intelligent SystemsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc