Theory of Robot Communication: II. Befriending a Robot over Time

In building on theories of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Human-Robot Interaction, and Media Psychology (i.e. Theory of Affective Bonding), the current paper proposes an explanation of how over time, people experience the mediated or simulated aspects of the interaction with a social robot. In two simultaneously running loops, a more reflective process is balanced with a more affective process. If human interference is detected behind the machine, Robot-Mediated Communication commences, which basically follows CMC assumptions; if human interference remains undetected, Human-Robot Communication comes into play, holding the robot for an autonomous social actor. The more emotionally aroused a robot user is, the more likely they develop an affective relationship with what actually is a machine. The main contribution of this paper is an integration of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human-Robot Communication, and Media Psychology, outlining a full-blown theory of robot communication connected to friendship formation, accounting for communicative features, modes of processing, as well as psychophysiology.Comment: Hoorn, J. F. (2018). Theory of robot communication: II. Befriending a robot over time. arXiv:cs, 2502572(v1), 1-2

Chapter 13 Haptic Creatures

Collaborations between entertainment industries and artificial intelligence researchers in Japan have since the mid-1990s produced a growing interest in modeling affect and emotion for use in mass-produced social robots. Robot producers and marketers reason that such robot companions can provide comfort, healing (iyashi), and intimacy in light of attenuating social bonds and increased socioeconomic stress characteristic of Japanese society since the collapse of the country’s bubble economy in the early 1990s. While many of these robots with so-called “artificial emotional intelligence” are equipped with rudimentary capacities to “read” predefined human emotion through such mechanisms as facial expression recognition, a new category of companion robots are more experimental. These robots do not interpret human emotion through affect-sensing software but rather invite human-robot interaction through affectively pleasing forms of haptic feedback. These new robots are called haptic creatures: robot companions designed to deliver a sense of comforting presence through a combination of animated movements and healing touch. Integrating historical analysis with ethnographic interviews with new users of these robots, and focusing in particular on the cat-like cushion robot Qoobo, this chapter argues that while companion robots are designed in part to understand specific human emotions, haptic creatures are created as experimental devices that can generate new and unexpected pleasures of affective care unique to human-robot relationships. It suggests that this distinction is critical for understanding and evaluating how corporations seek to use human-robot affect as a means to deliver care to consumers while also researching and building new markets for profit maximization

EMOTIONAL SYNCHRONIZATION-BASED HUMAN-ROBOT COMMUNICATION AND ITS EFFECTS

This paper presents a natural and comfortable communication system between human and robot based on synchronization to human emotional state using human facial expression recognition. The system consists of three parts: human emotion recognition, robotic emotion generation, and robotic emotion expression. The robot recognizes human emotion through human facial expressions, and robotic emotion is generated and synchronized with human emotion dynamically using a vector field of dynamics. The robot makes dynamically varying facial expressions to express its own emotions to the human. A communication experiment was conducted to examine the effectiveness of the proposed system. The authors found that subjects became much more comfortable after communicating with the robot with synchronized emotions. Subjects felt somewhat uncomfortable after communicating with the robot with non-synchronized emotions. During emotional synchronization, subjects communicated much more with the robot, and the communication time was double that during non-synchronization. Furthermore, in the case of emotional synchronization, subjects had good impressions of the robot, much better than the impressions in the case of non-synchronization. It was confirmed in this study that emotional synchronization in human-robot communication can be effective in making humans comfortable and makes the robot much more favorable and acceptable to humans.ArticleINTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMANOID ROBOTICS. 10(1):1350014 (2013)journal articl

Live human-robot interactive public demonstrations with automatic emotion and personality prediction.

Communication with humans is a multi-faceted phenomenon where the emotions, personality and non-verbal behaviours, as well as the verbal behaviours, play a significant role, and human-robot interaction (HRI) technologies should respect this complexity to achieve efficient and seamless communication. In this paper, we describe the design and execution of five public demonstrations made with two HRI systems that aimed at automatically sensing and analysing human participants' non-verbal behaviour and predicting their facial action units, facial expressions and personality in real time while they interacted with a small humanoid robot. We describe an overview of the challenges faced together with the lessons learned from those demonstrations in order to better inform the science and engineering fields to design and build better robots with more purposeful interaction capabilities. This article is part of the theme issue 'From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human-robot interaction'.EPSR