Towards collaboration between professional caregivers and robots - A preliminary study

International audienceIn this paper, we address the question of which potential use of a robot in a health-care environment is imagined by people that are not experts in robotics, and how these people imagine to teach new movements to a robot. We report on the preliminary results of our investigation , in which we conducted 40 interviews with non-experts in robotics and a focus group with professional caregivers

One-shot Evaluation of the Control Interface of a Robotic Arm by Non-Experts

International audienceIn this paper we study the relation between the performance of use and user preferences for a robotic arm control interface. We are interested in the user preference of non-experts after a one-shot evaluation of the interfaces on a test task. We also probe into the possible relation between user performance and individual factors. After a focus group study, we choose to compare the robotic arm joystick and a graphical user interface. Then, we studied the user performance and subjective evaluation of the interfaces during an experiment with the robot arm Jaco and N=23 healthy adults. Our preliminary results show that the user preference for a particular interface does not seem to depend on their performance in using it: for example, many users expressed their preference for the joystick while they were better performing with the graphical interface. Contrary to our expectations, this result does not seem to relate to the user's individual factors that we evaluated, namely desire for control and negative attitude towards robots

The implementation of autonomous vehicles by TNCs in Portugal

The increasing popularity of shared-mobility services completely reshaped the automotive industry particularly with the introduction of Transportation Network Companies like Uber. This research will mainly focus on the implementation of autonomous vehicles, namely vehicles with automated driving features that do not require human intervention by TNCs in Portugal. The main purpose is to investigate the motivations and barriers that influence people’s decision to prefer an autonomous vehicle over the conventional one when using a TNC as well as understand which demographic market segment is most attracted by this implementation. With this aim, 10 in-depth interviews were carried out as well as an online survey which collected 127 valid answers. Findings showed that, in general, people that use TNCs in Portugal tend to have a positive opinion regarding these companies as well as autonomous vehicles. However, there is still a certain hesitation towards the openness to choose an autonomous vehicle in this industry, mainly explained by privacy issues and its capacity to react to potential external threats. Moreover, people with more than 30 years old were far more receptive to choose an autonomous vehicle in this industry than the younger ones and women showed more resistance towards about the autonomous vehicles than men. Additionally, the majority of respondents believed that the probability of having an accident with these vehicles will decrease and they will be less damaging to the environment.A crescente popularidade dos serviços de mobilidade partilhada reconfiguraram a indústria automóvel particularmente com a introdução das plataformas digitais de transporte individual de passageiros em veículo descaracterizado (TVDE) como a Uber. Esta dissertação foca-se na implementação de veículos autónomos, nomeadamente veículos com funcionalidades automáticas que não requerem intervenção humana, nas plataformas digitais de TVDE em Portugal. O propósito deste estudo é então investigar as principais motivações e barreiras que influenciam a decisão das pessoas em preferir um carro autónomo quando utilizam estas plataformas digitais, assim como compreender qual o segmento demográfico que é mais atraído por esta implementação. Desta forma, foram realizadas 10 entrevistas e um questionário com 127 respostas válidas. Os resultados revelam que, em geral, as pessoas que usam estas plataformas em Portugal tendem a ter uma opinião positiva em relação a estas empresas bem como veículos autónomos. No entanto, existe uma certa hesitação devido a questões de privacidade ou à capacidade destes veículos em reagir a ameaças externas. Ademais, as pessoas com mais de 30 anos revelaram estar mais recetivas à implementação de carros autónomos nesta indústria do que as mais novas e as mulheres mais hesitantes do que os homens. Adicionalmente, a maioria dos participantes acreditam que a probabilidade de ter um acidente com estes veículos é menor assim como acreditam ser menos poluentes

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