An open platform for the design of social robot embodiments for face- to-face communication

The role of the physical embodiment of a social robot is of key importance during the interaction with humans. If we want to study the interactions we need to be able to change the robot’s embodiment to the nature of the experiment. Nowadays, researchers build one-off robots from scratch or choose to use a commercially available platform. This is justified by the time and budget constraints and the lack of design tools for social robots. In this work, we introduce an affordable open source platform to accelerate the design and production of novel social robot embodiments, with a focus on face-to-face communication. We describe an experiment where Industrial Design students created physical embodiments for 10 new social robots using our platform, detailing the design methodology followed during the different steps of the process. The paper gives an overview of the platform modules used by each of the robots, the skinning techniques employed, as well as the perceived usability of the platform. In summary, we show that our platform (1) enables non-experts to design new social robot embodiments, (2) allows a wide variety of different robots to be built with the same building blocks, and (3) affords itself to being adapted and extended

A Reference Software Architecture for Social Robots

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for the design of a reference software architecture for Social Robots. The ultimate goal of this work is to establish a common ground based on a reference software architecture to allow to easily reuse robotic software components in order to rapidly develop, implement, and personalise Social Robots

Embodied Gesture Processing: Motor-Based Integration of Perception and Action in Social Artificial Agents

A close coupling of perception and action processes is assumed to play an important role in basic capabilities of social interaction, such as guiding attention and observation of others’ behavior, coordinating the form and functions of behavior, or grounding the understanding of others’ behavior in one’s own experiences. In the attempt to endow artificial embodied agents with similar abilities, we present a probabilistic model for the integration of perception and generation of hand-arm gestures via a hierarchy of shared motor representations, allowing for combined bottom-up and top-down processing. Results from human-agent interactions are reported demonstrating the model’s performance in learning, observation, imitation, and generation of gestures

First Looks: CATaC '98\ud

The First International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication (CATaC’98), and its affiliated publications, seek to bring together current insights from philosophy, communication theory, and cultural sciences in an interdisciplinary dialogue. The synthesis of disparate scholarly ideas will shed greater light on just how culture impacts on the use and appropriation of new communications technologies. Beyond the individual contributions themselves, some of our most significant insights will emerge as we listen and discuss carefully with one another during the conference itself. As a way of preparing for that discussion, I offer the following overview of the CATaC papers and abstracts, along with a summary of the insights and questions they suggest

The influence of conversational agent embodiment and conversational relevance on socially desirable responding

Conversational agents (CAs) are becoming an increasingly common component in a wide range of information systems. A great deal of research to date has focused on enhancing traits that make CAs more humanlike. However, few studies have examined the influence such traits have on information disclosure. This research builds on self-disclosure, social desirability, and social presence theories to explain how CA anthropomorphism affects disclosure of personally sensitive information. Taken together, these theories suggest that as CAs become more humanlike, the social desirability of user responses will increase. In this study, we use a laboratory experiment to examine the influence of two elements of CA design—conversational relevance and embodiment—on the answers people give in response to sensitive and non-sensitive questions. We compare the responses given to various CAs to those given in a face-to-face interview and an online survey. The results show that for sensitive questions, CAs with better conversational abilities elicit more socially desirable responses from participants, with a less significant effect found for embodiment. These results suggest that for applications where eliciting honest answers to sensitive questions is important, CAs that are “better” in terms of humanlike realism may not be better for eliciting truthful responses to sensitive questions

Affordable avatar control system for personal robots

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2009.Includes bibliographical references (p. 76-79).Social robots (personal robots) emphasize individualized social interaction and communication with people. To maximize communication capacity of a personal robot, designers make it more anthropomorphic (or zoomorphic), and people tend to interact more naturally with such robots. However, adapting anthropomorphism (or zoomorphism) in social robots makes morphology of a robot more complex; thus, it becomes harder to control robots with existing interfaces. The Huggable is a robotic Teddy bear platform developed by the Personal Robots Group at the MIT Media Lab. It has its specific purpose in healthcare, elderly care, education, and family communication. It is important that a user can successfully convey the meaningful context in a dialogue via the robot's puppeteering interface. I investigate relevant technologies to develop a robotic puppetry system for a zoomorphic personal robot and develop three different puppeteering interfaces to control the robot: the website interface, wearable interface, and sympathetic interface. The wearable interface was examined through a performance test and the web interface was examined through a user study.by Jun Ki Lee.S.M