Studying the Co-Construction of Interaction Protocols in Collaborative Tasks with Humans

International audienceIn interaction, humans align and effortlessly create common ground in communication, allowing efficient collabora- tion in widely diverse contexts. Robots are still far away from being able to adapt in such a flexible manner with non-expert humans to complete collaborative tasks. Challenges include the capability to understand unknown feedback or guidance signals, to make sense of what they refer to depending on their timing and context, and to agree on how to organize the interaction into roles and turns. As a first step in approaching this issue, we investigate here the processes used by humans to negotiate a protocol of interaction when they do not already share one. We introduce a new experimental setup, where two humans have to collaborate to solve a task. The channels of communication they can use are constrained and force them to invent and agree on a shared interaction protocol in order to solve the task. These constraints allow us to analyze how a communication protocol is progressively established through the interplay and history of individual actions. We report preliminary results obtained from a pilot study, and discuss how the understanding of strategies used by humans could be useful to achieve more flexible HRI

Studying the Co-Construction of Interaction Protocols in Collaborative Tasks with Humans

International audienceIn interaction, humans align and effortlessly create common ground in communication, allowing efficient collabora- tion in widely diverse contexts. Robots are still far away from being able to adapt in such a flexible manner with non-expert humans to complete collaborative tasks. Challenges include the capability to understand unknown feedback or guidance signals, to make sense of what they refer to depending on their timing and context, and to agree on how to organize the interaction into roles and turns. As a first step in approaching this issue, we investigate here the processes used by humans to negotiate a protocol of interaction when they do not already share one. We introduce a new experimental setup, where two humans have to collaborate to solve a task. The channels of communication they can use are constrained and force them to invent and agree on a shared interaction protocol in order to solve the task. These constraints allow us to analyze how a communication protocol is progressively established through the interplay and history of individual actions. We report preliminary results obtained from a pilot study, and discuss how the understanding of strategies used by humans could be useful to achieve more flexible HRI

Acceptance and Applicability of Educational Robots. Evaluating Factors Contributing to a Successful Introduction of Social Robots into Education

Reich-Stiebert N. Acceptance and Applicability of Educational Robots. Evaluating Factors Contributing to a Successful Introduction of Social Robots into Education. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2019.The use of robots in the area of education is rapidly gaining momentum. Education faces restructuring and modernization in the forthcoming age of robots, thus necessitating research meeting the requirements of this development. In this, focusing on robots’ acceptance and applicability in educational contexts, right from the very beginning, is crucial. Therefore, this dissertation thesis has addressed this issue. It has striven to evaluate factors which contribute to a successful introduction of robots into education in a systematic manner. The strengths of the current work lie in its interdisciplinary nature, theoretical fundament, and the application of empirical and experimental methods. In practical terms, a set of studies have offered insights on how the implementation and application of robots in education could be facilitated. To do so, they operated on three different levels: First, the focus was on end users’ attitudes toward educational robots. It was shown that their attitudes and willingness to use educational robots were moderate. However, the results also indicated that the acceptance of educational robots could be fostered by the promotion of people’s general technical interest and a targeted use of robots in individual or small-group learning activities, in domains related to science and technology. In addition, it was found that user involvement in an educational robot’s design process can increase people’s general acceptance of educational robots. Second, the work focused on how to effectively design a human-robot interaction (HRI) for learning purposes by building upon the cooperative learning paradigm found in educational literature. Actual HRI experiments confirmed that a robot’s physical presence was beneficial for the learning experience, and implied that positive interdependence with a robot, social support from it, and mutual feedback about the learning process were positively related to the learning experience and the learners’ perception of the robot. Third, when tackling the issue of the ideal educational robot design, it has become clear that people’s perception of robots is influenced by context- and person-specific factors. To trigger a higher acceptance of educational robots, robotics research should match potential end users’ educational robot design concepts, for example, machinelike appearance and functionality as well as privacy and safety requirements. Taken together, this dissertation presents a sound basis for identifying issues related to the implementation and application of educational robots. However, research is still far from having completed the development of strategies for implementing and using social robots in education meaningfully. Consequently, potential future research directions will be discussed in light of the obtained results

Machine Learning Driven Emotional Musical Prosody for Human-Robot Interaction

This dissertation presents a method for non-anthropomorphic human-robot interaction using a newly developed concept entitled Emotional Musical Prosody (EMP). EMP consists of short expressive musical phrases capable of conveying emotions, which can be embedded in robots to accompany mechanical gestures. The main objective of EMP is to improve human engagement with, and trust in robots while avoiding the uncanny valley. We contend that music - one of the most emotionally meaningful human experiences - can serve as an effective medium to support human-robot engagement and trust. EMP allows for the development of personable, emotion-driven agents, capable of giving subtle cues to collaborators while presenting a sense of autonomy. We present four research areas aimed at developing and understanding the potential role of EMP in human-robot interaction. The first research area focuses on collecting and labeling a new EMP dataset from vocalists, and using this dataset to generate prosodic emotional phrases through deep learning methods. Through extensive listening tests, the collected dataset and generated phrases were validated with a high level of accuracy by a large subject pool. The second research effort focuses on understanding the effect of EMP in human-robot interaction with industrial and humanoid robots. Here, significant results were found for improved trust, perceived intelligence, and likeability of EMP enabled robotic arms, but not for humanoid robots. We also found significant results for improved trust in a social robot, as well as perceived intelligence, creativity and likeability in a robotic musician. The third and fourth research areas shift to broader use cases and potential methods to use EMP in HRI. The third research area explores the effect of robotic EMP on different personality types focusing on extraversion and neuroticism. For robots, personality traits offer a unique way to implement custom responses, individualized to human collaborators. We discovered that humans prefer robots with emotional responses based on high extraversion and low neuroticism, with some correlation between the humans collaborator’s own personality traits. The fourth and final research question focused on scaling up EMP to support interaction between groups of robots and humans. Here, we found that improvements in trust and likeability carried across from single robots to groups of industrial arms. Overall, the thesis suggests EMP is useful for improving trust and likeability for industrial, social and robot musicians but not in humanoid robots. The thesis bears future implications for HRI designers, showing the extensive potential of careful audio design, and the wide range of outcomes audio can have on HRI.Ph.D

Design e Ergonomia per la Human-Robot Interaction

This book investigates the relationship between design (specifically, the Human-Centred Design, Interaction Design and User Experience approaches) and the complex area of Human-Robot Interaction (specifically, social robotics for care). The research begins by framing the scientific problem of demographic aging and the increasing diffusion of wearable and robotic technologies for assisting and supporting the well-being and independence of the elderly and frail. Then, the research examines the role, contributions, and challenges of design in relation to the issue of acceptability in robotics, both from a theoretical-epistemological as well as from a practical-applicative viewpoint. The book, therefore, investigates methods and tools for implementing cross-disciplinary collaboration and for designing acceptability and interaction with new technologies in order to improve the quality of life and psychophysical health of human beings. The overall goal of the of the research presented in this volume is to bridge the gap between the two scientific areas of design and robotics, and let them converge in order to design assistive and social robots that can be effectively accepted as well as appropriate for people's specific needs. This is made possible through the development of a connection between the methodological approaches and tools of both disciplines in order to structure a framework for: cross-disciplinary collaboration and management of development processes in robotics research projects and design; and the application of the iterative process peculiar of HCD to robotics. On this basis, the research output was developed, namely the operational tool “Robotics & Design: the tool to design Human-Centered Assistive Robotics” which can be found at the link: www.roboticsdesign.org

Design e Ergonomia per la Human-Robot Interaction

This book investigates the relationship between design (specifically, the Human-Centred Design, Interaction Design and User Experience approaches) and the complex area of Human-Robot Interaction (specifically, social robotics for care). The research begins by framing the scientific problem of demographic aging and the increasing diffusion of wearable and robotic technologies for assisting and supporting the well-being and independence of the elderly and frail. Then, the research examines the role, contributions, and challenges of design in relation to the issue of acceptability in robotics, both from a theoretical-epistemological as well as from a practical-applicative viewpoint. The book, therefore, investigates methods and tools for implementing cross-disciplinary collaboration and for designing acceptability and interaction with new technologies in order to improve the quality of life and psychophysical health of human beings. The overall goal of the of the research presented in this volume is to bridge the gap between the two scientific areas of design and robotics, and let them converge in order to design assistive and social robots that can be effectively accepted as well as appropriate for people's specific needs. This is made possible through the development of a connection between the methodological approaches and tools of both disciplines in order to structure a framework for: cross-disciplinary collaboration and management of development processes in robotics research projects and design; and the application of the iterative process peculiar of HCD to robotics. On this basis, the research output was developed, namely the operational tool “Robotics & Design: the tool to design Human-Centered Assistive Robotics” which can be found at the link: www.roboticsdesign.org

The impact of the contingency of robot feedback on HRI

In this paper, we investigate the impact the contingency of robot feedback may have on the quality of verbal human-robot interaction. In order to assess not only what the effects are but also what they are caused by, we carried out experiments in which naïve participants instructed the humanoid robot iCub on a set of shapes and on a stacking task in two conditions, once with socially contingent, nonverbal feedback implemented in response to different gaze and demonstrating behaviors of the human tutor, and once with non-contingent, saliency-based feedback. The results of the analysis of participants' linguistic behaviors in the two conditions show that contingency has an impact on the complexity and the pre-structuring of the task for the robot, i.e. on the participants' tutoring behaviors. Contingency thus plays a considerable role for learning by demonstration