Exploring the Design Space of Robot Appearance and Behavior in an Attention-Seeking Living Room Scenario for a Robot Companion

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Avoiding the uncanny valley : robot appearance, personality and consistency of behavior in an attention-seeking home scenario for a robot companion

“The original publication is available at www.springerlink.com”. Copyright Springer. DOI: 10.1007/s10514-007-9058-3This article presents the results of video-based Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials which investigated people’s perceptions of different robot appearances and associated attention-seeking features and behaviors displayed by robots with different appearance and behaviors. The HRI trials studied the participants’ preferences for various features of robot appearance and behavior, as well as their personality attributions towards the robots compared to their own personalities. Overall, participants tended to prefer robots with more human-like appearance and attributes. However, systematic individual differences in the dynamic appearance ratings are not consistent with a universal effect. Introverts and participants with lower emotional stability tended to prefer the mechanical looking appearance to a greater degree than other participants. It is also shown that it is possible to rate individual elements of a particular robot’s behavior and then assess the contribution, or otherwise, of that element to the overall perception of the robot by people. Relating participants’ dynamic appearance ratings of individual robots to independent static appearance ratings provided evidence that could be taken to support a portion of the left hand side of Mori’s theoretically proposed ‘uncanny valley’ diagram. Suggestions for future work are outlined.Peer reviewe

Robotic Faces: Exploring Dynamical Patterns of Social Interaction between Humans and Robots

Thesis (Ph.D.) - Indiana University, Informatics, 2015The purpose of this dissertation is two-fold: 1) to develop an empirically-based design for an interactive robotic face, and 2) to understand how dynamical aspects of social interaction may be leveraged to design better interactive technologies and/or further our understanding of social cognition. Understanding the role that dynamics plays in social cognition is a challenging problem. This is particularly true in studying cognition via human-robot interaction, which entails both the natural social cognition of the human and the “artificial intelligence” of the robot. Clearly, humans who are interacting with other humans (or even other mammals such as dogs) are cognizant of the social nature of the interaction – their behavior in those cases differs from that when interacting with inanimate objects such as tools. Humans (and many other animals) have some awareness of “social”, some sense of other agents. However, it is not clear how or why. Social interaction patterns vary across culture, context, and individual characteristics of the human interactor. These factors are subsumed into the larger interaction system, influencing the unfolding of the system over time (i.e. the dynamics). The overarching question is whether we can figure out how to utilize factors that influence the dynamics of the social interaction in order to imbue our interactive technologies (robots, clinical AI, decision support systems, etc.) with some "awareness of social", and potentially create more natural interaction paradigms for those technologies. In this work, we explore the above questions across a range of studies, including lab-based experiments, field observations, and placing autonomous, interactive robotic faces in public spaces. We also discuss future work, how this research relates to making sense of what a robot "sees", creating data-driven models of robot social behavior, and development of robotic face personalities

Real-Time Indoor Movement Animation System In 3D Environment

In the era of smart homes, activities of daily living (ADLs) gains more and more attentions, ADLs can be used to present an individual’s living status, gauge an individual’s level of functioning and estimate his/her health condition. With smart devices, our daily motions can be captured and mapped into digital data, these raw data can be analyzed so that activities can be recognized. Although activities can be determined, they’re still represented as digital data, it would be boring, hard and time-consuming to read and understand such data. A system that could provide real-time monitoring and visualizing of an individual’s activities without privacy issue will be an urgent requirement for the non-technical, especially for nurses, doctors and family members, in order to observe people in need and in turn provide better nursing services. For this project, I present a real-time animation system for human movements in an 3D indoor environment with simultaneous tracking of an individual. This system collects and recognizes activities only through a smart phone and animates these movement behaviors in a 3D environment. The indoor activities are recognized by processing the data combination of magnetic field, acceleration and Wi-Fi signals. With this system, people can easily see the daily movement information of an individual and where that individual is located at a specific time. The purpose of this system is to provide a cost-effective and convenient healthcare service for people in need