Personality perception of robot avatar tele-operators

© 2016 IEEE. Nowadays a significant part of human-human interaction takes place over distance. Tele-operated robot avatars, in which an operator's behaviours are portrayed by a robot proxy, have the potential to improve distance interaction, e.g., improving social presence and trust. However, having communication mediated by a robot changes the perception of the operator's appearance and behaviour, which have been shown to be used alongside vocal cues in judging personality. In this paper we present a study that investigates how robot mediation affects the way the personality of the operator is perceived. More specifically, we aim to investigate if judges of personality can be consistent in assessing personality traits, can agree with one another, can agree with operators' self-assessed personality, and shift their perceptions to incorporate characteristics associated with the robot's appearance. Our experiments show that (i) judges utilise robot appearance cues along with operator vocal cues to make their judgements, (ii) operators' arm gestures reproduced on the robot aid personality judgements, and (iii) how personality cues are perceived and evaluated through speech, gesture and robot appearance is highly operator-dependent. We discuss the implications of these results for both tele-operated and autonomous robots that aim to portray personality.This work was funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref: EP/L00416X/1).This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from IEEE via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1109/HRI.2016.745174

Robot mediated communication: Enhancing tele-presence using an avatar

In the past few years there has been a lot of development in the field of tele-presence. These developments have caused tele-presence technologies to become easily accessible and also for the experience to be enhanced. Since tele-presence is not only used for tele-presence assisted group meetings but also in some forms of Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), these activities have also been facilitated. One of the lingering issues has to do with how to properly transmit presence of non-co-located members to the rest of the group. Using current commercially available tele-presence technology it is possible to exhibit a limited level of social presence but no physical presence. In order to cater for this lack of presence a system is implemented here using tele-operated robots as avatars for remote team members and had its efficacy tested. This testing includes both the level of presence that can be exhibited by robot avatars but also how the efficacy of these robots for this task changes depending on the morphology of the robot. Using different types of robots, a humanoid robot and an industrial robot arm, as tele-presence avatars, it is found that the humanoid robot using an appropriate control system is better at exhibiting a social presence. Further, when compared to a voice only scenario, both robots proved significantly better than with only voice in terms of both cooperative task solving and social presence. These results indicate that using an appropriate control system, a humanoid robot can be better than an industrial robot in these types of tasks and the validity of aiming for a humanoid design behaving in a human-like way in order to emulate social interactions that are closer to human norms. This has implications for the design of autonomous socially interactive robot systems

Iconic gestures for robot avatars, recognition and integration with speech

© 2016 Bremner and Leonards. Co-verbal gestures are an important part of human communication, improving its efficiency and efficacy for information conveyance. One possible means by which such multi-modal communication might be realized remotely is through the use of a tele-operated humanoid robot avatar. Such avatars have been previously shown to enhance social presence and operator salience. We present a motion tracking based tele-operation system for the NAO robot platform that allows direct transmission of speech and gestures produced by the operator. To assess the capabilities of this system for transmitting multi-modal communication, we have conducted a user study that investigated if robot-produced iconic gestures are comprehensible, and are integrated with speech. Robot performed gesture outcomes were compared directly to those for gestures produced by a human actor, using a within participant experimental design. We show that iconic gestures produced by a tele-operated robot are understood by participants when presented alone, almost as well as when produced by a human. More importantly, we show that gestures are integrated with speech when presented as part of a multi-modal communication equally well for human and robot performances

Technology-mediated distortions: a review on the biases and misperceptions in employment interviews via computer, telephone and AI

Biases in job interviews threaten the objective evaluation of applicants. Similar and different biases exist also in mediated job interviews, where the communication between applicant and interviewer passes through a techno-logical software or hardware. This review synthetises the literature investigat-ing biases in job interviews conducted through telephone, videoconference, asynchronous videos or avatars. Moreover, this review reports perceptions ap-plicants and interviewers had of such modalities. Overall, applicants received lower ratings in mediated interviews compared to face-to-face ones. In fact, lack of nonverbal cues, bad audio/video quality, lags and non-neutral interview lo-cations hinder interviewers in performing objective assessments of applicants. Moreover, the appearance of avatars is another source of bias, as the charac-teristics of avatars merge with or override those of applicants. Regarding per-ceptions, interviewers and applicants expressed mainly negative perceptions. In particular, applicants were particularly concerned about privacy and fair-ness, with the latter being lower for mediated interviews. Furthermore, avatars accentuate biases of face-to-face interviews and can appear “creepy” to appli-cants. Finally, technological mediation presents other downsides, i.e., in-creased difficulty in the interviewer-applicant interaction and a rigid and imper-sonal process. Despite these biases, negative perceptions and downsides, technological mediation brings about simpler and more accessible interviews for applicants and recruiters, along with the chance of a greater level of inter-view standardisation. To solve the issues of mediated interviews, researchers suggest to do less interviews, pair them with other forms of assessment, stand-ardise interviews more, better inform applicants and make avatars able to transmit more characteristics of their operators, such as nonverbal cues.Biases in job interviews threaten the objective evaluation of applicants. Similar and different biases exist also in mediated job interviews, where the communication between applicant and interviewer passes through a techno-logical software or hardware. This review synthetises the literature investigat-ing biases in job interviews conducted through telephone, videoconference, asynchronous videos or avatars. Moreover, this review reports perceptions ap-plicants and interviewers had of such modalities. Overall, applicants received lower ratings in mediated interviews compared to face-to-face ones. In fact, lack of nonverbal cues, bad audio/video quality, lags and non-neutral interview lo-cations hinder interviewers in performing objective assessments of applicants. Moreover, the appearance of avatars is another source of bias, as the charac-teristics of avatars merge with or override those of applicants. Regarding per-ceptions, interviewers and applicants expressed mainly negative perceptions. In particular, applicants were particularly concerned about privacy and fair-ness, with the latter being lower for mediated interviews. Furthermore, avatars accentuate biases of face-to-face interviews and can appear “creepy” to appli-cants. Finally, technological mediation presents other downsides, i.e., in-creased difficulty in the interviewer-applicant interaction and a rigid and imper-sonal process. Despite these biases, negative perceptions and downsides, technological mediation brings about simpler and more accessible interviews for applicants and recruiters, along with the chance of a greater level of inter-view standardisation. To solve the issues of mediated interviews, researchers suggest to do less interviews, pair them with other forms of assessment, stand-ardise interviews more, better inform applicants and make avatars able to transmit more characteristics of their operators, such as nonverbal cues

Audio-driven Robot Upper-body Motion Synthesis

Body language is an important aspect of human communication, which an effective human-robot interaction interface should mimic well. The currently available robotic platforms are limited in their ability to automatically generate behaviours that align with their speech. In this paper, we developed a neural network based system that takes audio from a user as an input and generates upper-body gestures including head, hand and hip movements of the user on a humanoid robot, namely, Softbank Robotics’ Pepper. The developed system was evaluated quantitatively as well as qualitatively using web-surveys when driven by natural speech and synthetic speech. We particularly compared the impact of generic and person-specific neural network models on the quality of synthesised movements. We further investigated the relationships between quantitative and qualitative evaluations and examined how the speaker’s personality traits affect the synthesised movements

Personality Perception of Robot Avatar Teleoperators in Solo and Dyadic Tasks

Humanoid robot avatars are a potential new telecommunication tool, whereby a user is remotely represented by a robot that replicates their arm, head, and possible face movements. They have been shown to have a number of benefits over more traditional media such as phones or video calls. However, using a teleoperated humanoid as a communication medium inherently changes the appearance of the operator, and appearance-based stereotypes are used in interpersonal judgments (whether consciously or unconsciously). One such judgment that plays a key role in how people interact is personality. Hence, we have been motivated to investigate if and how using a robot avatar alters the perceived personality of teleoperators. To do so, we carried out two studies where participants performed 3 communication tasks, solo in study one and dyadic in study two, and were recorded on video both with and without robot mediation. Judges recruited using online crowdsourcing services then made personality judgments of the participants in the video clips. We observed that judges were able to make internally consistent trait judgments in both communication conditions. However, judge agreement was affected by robot mediation, although which traits were affected was highly task dependent. Our most important finding was that in dyadic tasks personality trait perception was shifted to incorporate cues relating to the robot’s appearance when it was used to communicate. Our findings have important implications for telepresence robot design and personality expression in autonomous robots.This work was funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref: EP/L00416X/1)

Automatic Replication of Teleoperator Head Movements and Facial Expressions on a Humanoid Robot

Robotic telepresence aims to create a physical presence for a remotely located human (teleoperator) by reproducing their verbal and nonverbal behaviours (e.g. speech, gestures, facial expressions) on a robotic platform. In this work, we propose a novel teleoperation system that combines the replication of facial expressions of emotions (neutral, disgust, happiness, and surprise) and head movements on the fly on the humanoid robot Nao. Robots' expression of emotions is constrained by their physical and behavioural capabilities. As the Nao robot has a static face, we use the LEDs located around its eyes to reproduce the teleoperator expressions of emotions. Using a web camera, we computationally detect the facial action units and measure the head pose of the operator. The emotion to be replicated is inferred from the detected action units by a neural network. Simultaneously, the measured head motion is smoothed and bounded to the robot's physical limits by applying a constrained-state Kalman filter. In order to evaluate the proposed system, we conducted a user study by asking 28 participants to use the replication system by displaying facial expressions and head movements while being recorded by a web camera. Subsequently, 18 external observers viewed the recorded clips via an online survey and assessed the quality of the robot's replication of the participants' behaviours. Our results show that the proposed teleoperation system can successfully communicate emotions and head movements, resulting in a high agreement among the external observers (ICC_E = 0.91, ICC_HP = 0.72).This work was funded by the EPSRC under its IDEAS Factory Sandpits call on Digital Personhood (Grant Ref· EP/L00416X/1)