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

The Notion of Language Game : A Natural Unit of Dialogue and Discourse

The study of dialogue is a relatively new area for linguistic research. Only ten years ago, linguists were mostly occupied with the analysis of sentences and their internal structure on various levels. In other disciplines, however, such as sociology, anthropology and philosophy, discourse has been a frequent object of study in investigations concerning the role of language in human activities from different perspectives. In this paper, I will argue that the notion of language game, introduced by Wittgenstein and discussed by many others, is the natural candidate for such a unit. The game concept is, if we make it somewhat precise , very general and covers central properties of social action (cf.  Lyttkens 1981). Many authors have already begun to explore that concept for the purpose of studying dialogue (see e .g. Mann , Moore and Levivn 1977 , Levinson1979). Others use concepts that are in some respects equivalent to the game concept (see e.g. the discussion below of Reichman 's context space theory)

A study of spatial configurations in social robotic telepresence

This paper presents tools for measuring the qualityof interaction in social mobile robotic telepresence. Themethodology is in part based on Adam Kendon’s theory of F-formations.The theory is based on observations of how bodiesnaturally orient themselves during interaction between peoplein real life settings. In addition, two presence questionnaires(Temple Presence Inventory and Networked Minds Social PresenceInventory), designed to measure the users’ perceptionsof others and the environment when experienced through acommunication medium were used. The perceived presence andease of use are correlated to the spatial formations between therobot and an actor. Use of the tools is validated experimentallyon a dataset consisting of interactions between an elder (actor)and 21 different users being trained in piloting a mobile robotictelepresence unit. The evaluation has shown that these tools aresuitable for evaluating mobile robotic telepresence and also thatcorrelations between the tools used exist. Further, also from alocal user perspective, the spatial formations have affected theperceived comfort in an interaction