4,659 research outputs found
Companion robots: the hallucinatory danger of human-robot interactions
The advent of the so-called Companion Robots is raising many ethical concerns among scholars and in the public opinion. Focusing mainly on robots caring for the elderly, in this paper we analyze these concerns to distinguish which are directly ascribable to robotic, and which are instead preexistent. One of these is the âdeception objectionâ, namely the ethical unacceptability of deceiving the user about the simulated nature of the robotâs behaviors. We argue on the inconsistency of this charge, as today formulated. After that, we underline the risk, for human-robot interaction, to become a hallucinatory relation where the human would subjectify the robot in a dynamic of meaning-overload. Finally, we analyze the definition of âquasi-otherâ relating to the notion of âuncannyâ. The goal of this paper is to argue that the main concern about Companion Robots is the simulation of a human-like interaction in the absence of an autonomous robotic horizon of meaning. In addition, that absence could lead the human to build a hallucinatory reality based on the relation with the robot
Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems
As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing
environments questions of choreography become central to their design,
placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a
system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and
form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The
interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the
system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human
counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human
counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and
the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task
completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and
movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design
methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify
simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have
detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides
approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and
artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The
background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives,
improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this
context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community
building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary
research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering
of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for
rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help
understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other
groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for
the 21st Century)"
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis
Learning robot policies using a high-level abstraction persona-behaviour simulator
2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting /republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other worksCollecting data in Human-Robot Interaction for training learning agents might be a hard task to accomplish. This is especially true when the target users are older adults with dementia since this usually requires hours of interactions and puts quite a lot of workload on the user. This paper addresses the problem of importing the Personas technique from HRI to create fictional patientsâ profiles. We propose a Persona-Behaviour Simulator tool that provides, with high-level abstraction, userâs actions during an HRI task, and we apply it to cognitive training exercises for older adults with dementia. It consists of a Persona Definition that characterizes a patient along four dimensions and a Task Engine that provides information regarding the task complexity. We build a simulated environment where the high-level userâs actions are provided by the simulator and the robot initial policy is learned using a Q-learning algorithm. The results show that the current simulator provides a reasonable initial policy for a defined Persona profile. Moreover, the learned robot assistance has proved to be robust to potential changes in the userâs behaviour. In this way, we can speed up the fine-tuning of the rough policy during the real interactions to tailor the assistance to the given user. We believe the presented approach can be easily extended to account for other types of HRI tasks; for example, when input data is required to train a learning algorithm, but data collection is very expensive or unfeasible. We advocate that simulation is a convenient tool in these cases.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Externalising moods and psychological states in a cloud based system to enhance a pet-robot and childâs interaction
Background:This PATRICIA research project is about using pet robots to reduce pain
and anxiety in hospitalized children. The study began 2 years ago and it is believed that
the advances made in this project are significant. Patients, parents, nurses, psycholo-
gists, and engineers have adopted the Pleo robot, a baby dinosaur robotic pet, which
works in different ways to assist children during hospitalization.
Methods: Focus is spent on creating a wireless communication system with the Pleo
in order to help the coordinator, who conducts therapy with the child, monitor, under-
stand, and control Pleoâs behavior at any moment. This article reports how this techno-
logical function is being developed and tested.
Results: Wireless communication between the Pleo and an Android device is
achieved. The developed Android app allows the user to obtain any state of the robot
without stopping its interaction with the patient. Moreover, information is sent to a
cloud, so that robot moods, states and interactions can be shared among different
robots.
Conclusions: Pleo attachment was successful for more than 1 month, working with
children in therapy, which makes the investment capable of positive therapeutic
possibilities. This technical improvement in the Pleo addresses two key issues in social
robotics: needing an enhanced response to maintain the attention and engagement of
the child, and using the system as a platform to collect the states of the childâs progress
for clinical purposes.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
What is Consciousness For?
What is Consciousness For?
Lee Pierson and Monroe Trout
Copyright © 2005
Abstract: The answer to the title question is, in a word, volition. Our hypothesis is that the ultimate adaptive function of consciousness is to make volitional movement possible. All conscious processes exist to subserve that ultimate function. Thus, we believe that all conscious organisms possess at least some volitional capability. Consciousness makes volitional attention possible; volitional attention, in turn, makes volitional movement possible. There is, as far as we know, no valid theoretical argument that consciousness is needed for any function other than volitional movement and no convincing empirical evidence that consciousness performs any other ultimate function. Consciousness, via volitional action, increases the likelihood that an organism will direct its attention, and ultimately its movements, to whatever is most important for its survival and reproduction
What does touch tell us about emotions in touchscreen-based gameplay?
This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2012 ACM. It is posted here by permission of ACM for your personal use. Not for redistribution.Nowadays, more and more people play games on touch-screen mobile phones. This phenomenon raises a very interesting question: does touch behaviour reflect the playerâs emotional state? If possible, this would not only be a valuable evaluation indicator for game designers, but also for real-time personalization of the game experience. Psychology studies on acted touch behaviour show the existence of discriminative affective profiles. In this paper, finger-stroke features during gameplay on an iPod were extracted and their discriminative power analysed. Based on touch-behaviour, machine learning algorithms were used to build systems for automatically discriminating between four emotional states (Excited, Relaxed, Frustrated, Bored), two levels of arousal and two levels of valence. The results were very interesting reaching between 69% and 77% of correct discrimination between the four emotional states. Higher results (~89%) were obtained for discriminating between two levels of arousal and two levels of valence
How do you Play with a Robotic Toy Animal? A long-term study of Pleo
Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market, taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was interacted with and reflected upon in the homes of six families during 2 to 10 months. Our analysis emphasizes a discrepancy between the participantsâ initial desires to borrow a Pleo and what they reported later on about their actual experiences. Further, the data suggests an apparent tension between participants expecting the robot to work as a âtoyâ while making consistent comparisons with real pet animals. We end by discussing a series of implications for design of this category of toys, in order to better maintain interest and engagement over time
An Evaluation Schema for the Ethical Use of Autonomous Robotic Systems in Security Applications
We propose a multi-step evaluation schema designed to help procurement agencies and others to examine the ethical dimensions of autonomous systems to be applied in the security sector, including autonomous weapons systems
Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot
© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Unionâs Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007â2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe
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