1,764 research outputs found
Integration of Action and Language Knowledge: A Roadmap for Developmental Robotics
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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
Making New "New AI" Friends : Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective
Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with "robot diabetes" that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes by providing them with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an "Embodied" (formerly also known as "New") Artificial Intelligence approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how "New AI" provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child-robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio
A synchrony based approach for human robot interaction
As psychologists considered synchrony as an important parameter for social interaction, we hypothesize that in the case of social interaction, people focus their attention on regions of interest where the visual stimuli are synchronized with their inner dynamics. Then, we assume that a mechanism able to detect synchrony between internal dynamics of a robot and external visual stimuli can be used as a starting point for human robot interaction. Inspired by human psychological and neurobiological data, we propose a synchrony based neural network architecture capable of selecting the robot interaction partner and of locating Focus of Attention
Can Real-time, Adaptive Human-Robot Motor Coordination Improve Humans’ Overall Perception of a Robot?
Previous research on social interaction among humans suggested that interpersonal motor coordination can help to establish social rapport. Our research addresses the question of whether, in a human-humanoid interaction experiment, the human’s overall perception of a robot can be improved by realising motor coordination behaviour that allows the robot to adapt in real-time to a person’s behaviour. A synchrony detection method using information distance was adopted to realise the real-time human-robot motor coordination behaviour, which guided the humanoid robot to coordinate its movements to a human by measuring the behaviour synchrony between the robot and the human. The feedback of the participants indicated that most of the participants preferred to interact with the humanoid robot with the adaptive motor coordination capability. The results of this proof-of-concept study suggest that the motor coordination mechanism improved humans’ overall perception of the humanoid robot. Together with our previous findings, namely that humans actively coordinate their behaviours to a humanoid robot’s behaviours, this study further supports the hypothesis that bidirectional motor coordination could be a valid approach to facilitate adaptive human-humanoid interaction.Peer reviewedFinal Accepted Versio
Explorations in engagement for humans and robots
This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which
individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived
connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among
human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also
describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational,
collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports
on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot
when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the
human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they
direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement
gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when
engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
Neuronal oscillations, information dynamics, and behaviour: an evolutionary robotics study
Oscillatory neural activity is closely related to cognition and behaviour, with synchronisation mechanisms playing a key role in the integration and functional organization of different cortical areas. Nevertheless, its informational content and relationship with behaviour - and hence cognition - are still to be fully understood.
This thesis is concerned with better understanding the role of neuronal oscillations and information dynamics towards the generation of embodied cognitive behaviours and with investigating the efficacy of such systems as practical robot controllers. To this end, we develop a novel model based on the Kuramoto model of coupled phase oscillators and perform three minimally cognitive evolutionary robotics experiments. The analyses focus both on a behavioural level description, investigating the robot’s trajectories, and on a mechanism level description, exploring the variables’ dynamics and the information transfer properties within and between the agent’s body and the environment.
The first experiment demonstrates that in an active categorical perception task under normal and inverted vision, networks with a definite, but not too strong, propensity for synchronisation are more able to reconfigure, to organise themselves functionally, and to adapt to different behavioural conditions. The second experiment relates assembly constitution and phase reorganisation dynamics to performance in supervised and unsupervised learning tasks. We demonstrate that assembly dynamics facilitate the evolutionary process, can account for varying degrees of stimuli modulation of the sensorimotor interactions, and can contribute to solving different tasks leaving aside other plasticity mechanisms. The third experiment explores an associative learning task considering a more realistic connectivity pattern between neurons. We demonstrate that networks with travelling waves as a default solution perform poorly compared to networks that are normally synchronised in the absence of stimuli.
Overall, this thesis shows that neural synchronisation dynamics, when suitably flexible and reconfigurable, produce an asymmetric flow of information and can generate minimally cognitive embodied behaviours
Acceptability of the transitional wearable companion “+me” in typical children: a pilot study
This work presents the results of the first experimentation of +me-the first prototype of
Transitional Wearable Companion–run on 15 typically developed (TD) children with ages
between 8 and 34 months. +me is an interactive device that looks like a teddy bear that
can be worn around the neck, has touch sensors, can emit appealing lights and sounds,
and has input-output contingencies that can be regulated with a tablet via Bluetooth.
The participants were engaged in social play activities involving both the device and
an adult experimenter. +me was designed with the objective of exploiting its intrinsic
allure as an attractive toy to stimulate social interactions (e.g., eye contact, turn taking,
imitation, social smiles), an aspect potentially helpful in the therapy of Autism Spectrum
Disorders (ASD) and other Pervasive Developmental Disorders (PDD). The main purpose
of this preliminary study is to evaluate the general acceptability of the toy by TD children,
observing the elicited behaviors in preparation for future experiments involving children
with ASD and other PDD. First observations, based on video recording and scoring,
show that +me stimulates good social engagement in TD children, especially when their
age is higher than 24 months
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