Investigating the Effects of Robot Engagement Communication on Learning from Demonstration

Robot Learning from Demonstration (RLfD) is a technique for robots to derive policies from instructors' examples. Although the reciprocal effects of student engagement on teacher behavior are widely recognized in the educational community, it is unclear whether the same phenomenon holds true for RLfD. To fill this gap, we first design three types of robot engagement behavior (attention, imitation, and a hybrid of the two) based on the learning literature. We then conduct, in a simulation environment, a within-subject user study to investigate the impact of different robot engagement cues on humans compared to a "without-engagement" condition. Results suggest that engagement communication significantly changes the human's estimation of the robots' capability and significantly raises their expectation towards the learning outcomes, even though we do not run actual learning algorithms in the experiments. Moreover, imitation behavior affects humans more than attention does in all metrics, while their combination has the most profound influences on humans. We also find that communicating engagement via imitation or the combined behavior significantly improve humans' perception towards the quality of demonstrations, even if all demonstrations are of the same quality.Comment: Under revie

The influence of social cues in persuasive social robots on psychological reactance and compliance

People can react negatively to persuasive attempts experiencing reactance, which gives rise to negative feelings and thoughts and may reduce compliance. This research examines social responses towards persuasive social agents. We present a laboratory experiment which assessed reactance and compliance to persuasive attempts delivered by an artificial (non-robotic) social agent, a social robot with minimal social cues (human-like face with speech output and blinking eyes), and a social robot with enhanced social cues (human-like face with head movement, facial expression, affective intonation of speech output). Our results suggest that a social robot presenting more social cues will cause higher reactance and this effect is stronger when the user feels involved in the task at hand

Socially assistive robots : the specific case of the NAO

Numerous researches have studied the development of robotics, especially socially assistive robots (SAR), including the NAO robot. This small humanoid robot has a great potential in social assistance. The NAO robot’s features and capabilities, such as motricity, functionality, and affective capacities, have been studied in various contexts. The principal aim of this study is to gather every research that has been done using this robot to see how the NAO can be used and what could be its potential as a SAR. Articles using the NAO in any situation were found searching PSYCHINFO, Computer and Applied Sciences Complete and ACM Digital Library databases. The main inclusion criterion was that studies had to use the NAO robot. Studies comparing it with other robots or intervention programs were also included. Articles about technical improvements were excluded since they did not involve concrete utilisation of the NAO. Also, duplicates and articles with an important lack of information on sample were excluded. A total of 51 publications (1895 participants) were included in the review. Six categories were defined: social interactions, affectivity, intervention, assisted teaching, mild cognitive impairment/dementia, and autism/intellectual disability. A great majority of the findings are positive concerning the NAO robot. Its multimodality makes it a SAR with potential

Persuasiveness of social robot ‘Nao’ based on gaze and proximity

Social Robots have widely infiltrated the retail and public space. Mainly, social robots are being utilized across a wide range of scenarios to influence decision making, disseminate information, and act as a signage mechanism, under the umbrella of Persuasive Robots or Persuasive Technology. While there have been several studies in the afore-mentioned area, the effect of non-verbal behaviour on persuasive abilities is generally unexplored. Therefore, in this research, we report whether two key non-verbal attributes, namely proximity and gaze, can elicit persuasively, compliance, and specific personality appeals. For this, we conducted a 2 (eye gaze) x 2 (proximity) between-subjects experiment where participants viewed a video-based scenario of the Nao robot. Our initial results did not reveal any significant results based on the non-verbal attributes. However, perceived compliance and persuasion were significantly correlated with knowledge, responsiveness, and trustworthiness. In conclusion, we discuss how the design of a robot could make it more convincing as extensive marketing and brand promotion companies could use robots to enhance their advertisement operations

Metrics to Evaluate Human Teaching Engagement From a Robot's Point of View

This thesis was motivated by a study of how robots can be taught by humans, with an emphasis on allowing persons without programming skills to teach robots. The focus of this thesis was to investigate what criteria could or should be used by a robot to evaluate whether a human teacher is (or potentially could be) a good teacher in robot learning by demonstration. In effect, choosing the teacher that can maximize the benefit to the robot using learning by imitation/demonstration. The study approached this topic by taking a technology snapshot in time to see if a representative example of research laboratory robot technology is capable of assessing teaching quality. With this snapshot, this study evaluated how humans observe teaching quality to attempt to establish measurement metrics that can be transferred as rules or algorithms that are beneficial from a robot’s point of view. To evaluate teaching quality, the study looked at the teacher-student relationship from a human-human interaction perspective. Two factors were considered important in defining a good teacher: engagement and immediacy. The study gathered more literature reviews relating to further detailed elements of engagement and immediacy. The study also tried to link physical effort as a possible metric that could be used to measure the level of engagement of the teachers. An investigatory experiment was conducted to evaluate which modality the participants prefer to employ in teaching a robot if the robot can be taught using voice, gesture demonstration, or physical manipulation. The findings from this experiment suggested that the participants appeared to have no preference in terms of human effort for completing the task. However, there was a significant difference in human enjoyment preferences of input modality and a marginal difference in the robot’s perceived ability to imitate. A main experiment was conducted to study the detailed elements that might be used by a robot in identifying a “good” teacher. The main experiment was conducted in two subexperiments. The first part recorded the teacher’s activities and the second part analysed how humans evaluate the perception of engagement when assessing another human teaching a robot. The results from the main experiment suggested that in human teaching of a robot (human-robot interaction), humans (the evaluators) also look for some immediacy cues that happen in human-human interaction for evaluating the engagement

人の行動計測によるユーザタイプを考慮したヒューマンロボットインタラクション

首都大学東

Humanoid-based protocols to study social cognition

Social cognition is broadly defined as the way humans understand and process their interactions with other humans. In recent years, humans have become more and more used to interact with non-human agents, such as technological artifacts. Although these interactions have been restricted to human-controlled artifacts, they will soon include interactions with embodied and autonomous mechanical agents, i.e., robots. This challenge has motivated an area of research related to the investigation of human reactions towards robots, widely referred to as Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Classical HRI protocols often rely on explicit measures, e.g., subjective reports. Therefore, they cannot address the quantification of the crucial implicit social cognitive processes that are evoked during an interaction. This thesis aims to develop a link between cognitive neuroscience and human-robot interaction (HRI) to study social cognition. This approach overcomes methodological constraints of both fields, allowing to trigger and capture the mechanisms of real-life social interactions while ensuring high experimental control. The present PhD work demonstrates this through the systematic study of the effect of online eye contact on gaze-mediated orienting of attention. The study presented in Publication I aims to adapt the gaze-cueing paradigm from cognitive science to an objective neuroscientific HRI protocol. Furthermore, it investigates whether the gaze-mediated orienting of attention is sensitive to the establishment of eye contact. The study replicates classic screen-based findings of attentional orienting mediated by gaze both at behavioral and neural levels, highlighting the feasibility and the scientific value of adding neuroscientific methods to HRI protocols. The aim of the study presented in Publication II is to examine whether and how real-time eye contact affects the dual-component model of joint attention orienting. To this end, cue validity and stimulus-to-onset asynchrony are also manipulated. The results show an interactive effect of strategic (cue validity) and social (eye contact) top-down components on the botton-up reflexive component of gaze-mediated orienting of attention. The study presented in Publication III aims to examine the subjective engagement and attribution of human likeness towards the robot depending on established eye contact or not during a joint attention task. Subjective reports show that eye contact increases human likeness attribution and feelings of engagement with the robot compared to a no-eye contact condition. The aim of the study presented in Publication IV is to investigate whether eye contact established by a humanoid robot affects objective measures of engagement (i.e. joint attention and fixation durations), and subjective feelings of engagement with the robot during a joint attention task. Results show that eye contact modulates attentional engagement, with longer fixations at the robot’s face and cueing effect when the robot establishes eye contact. In contrast, subjective reports show that the feeling of being engaged with the robot in an HRI protocol is not modulated by real-time eye contact. This study further supports the necessity for adding objective methods to HRI. Overall, this PhD work shows that embodied artificial agents can advance the theoretical knowledge of social cognitive mechanisms by serving as sophisticated interactive stimuli of high ecological validity and excellent experimental control. Moreover, humanoid-based protocols grounded in cognitive science can advance the HRI community by informing about the exact cognitive mechanisms that are present during HRI

Probing Cognitive Enhancements of Social Resonance Towards a Aesthetic Community of Sensing and Making Music Together

N/

Proto-communication,Social Bonding and Persuasiveness for Minimally Designed Robots Scaffolded by Non-Expert Trainers

豊橋技術科学大