Making New "New AI" Friends : Designing a Social Robot for Diabetic Children from an Embodied AI Perspective

Open Access: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.Robin is a cognitively and motivationally autonomous affective robot toddler with "robot diabetes" that we have developed to support perceived self-efficacy and emotional wellbeing in children with diabetes by providing them with positive mastery experiences of diabetes management in a playful but realistic and natural interaction context. Underlying the design of Robin is an "Embodied" (formerly also known as "New") Artificial Intelligence approach to robotics. In this paper we discuss the rationale behind the design of Robin to meet the needs of our intended end users (both children and medical staff), and how "New AI" provides a suitable approach to developing a friendly companion that fulfills the therapeutic and affective requirements of our end users beyond other approaches commonly used in assistive robotics and child-robot interaction. Finally, we discuss how our approach permitted our robot to interact with and provide suitable experiences of diabetes management to children with very different social interaction styles.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Hedonic Quality or Reward? A Study of Basic Pleasure in Homeostasis and Decision Making of a Motivated Autonomous Robot

© The Author (s) 2016. Published by SAGE. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).We present a robot architecture and experiments to investigate some of the roles that pleasure plays in the decision making (action selection) process of an autonomous robot that must survive in its environment. We have conducted three sets of experiments to assess the effect of different types of pleasure---related versus unrelated to the satisfaction of physiological needs---under different environmental circumstances. Our results indicate that pleasure, including pleasure unrelated to need satisfaction, has value for homeostatic management in terms of improved viability and increased flexibility in adaptive behavior.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Eliciting Caregiving Behavior in Dyadic Human-Robot Attachment-Like Interactions

We present here the design and applications of an arousal-based model controlling the behavior of a Sony AIBO robot during the exploration of a novel environment: a children’s play mat. When the robot experiences too many new perceptions, the increase of arousal triggers calls for attention towards its human caregiver. The caregiver can choose to either calm the robot down by providing it with comfort, or to leave the robot coping with the situation on its own. When the arousal of the robot has decreased, the robot moves on to further explore the play mat. We gathered results from two experiments using this arousal-driven control architecture. In the first setting, we show that such a robotic architecture allows the human caregiver to influence greatly the learning outcomes of the exploration episode, with some similarities to a primary care- giver during early childhood. In a second experiment, we tested how human adults behaved in a similar setup with two different robots: one “needy”, often demanding attention, and one more independent, requesting far less care or assistance. Our results show that human adults recognise each profile of the robot for what they have been designed, and behave accordingly to what would be expected, caring more for the needy robot than for the other. Additionally, the subjects exhibited a preference and more positive affect whilst interacting and rating the robot we designed as needy. This experiment leads us to the conclusion that our architecture and setup succeeded in eliciting positive and caregiving behavior from adults of different age groups and technological background. Finally, the consistency and reactivity of the robot during this dyadic interaction appeared crucial for the enjoyment and engagement of the human partner.Peer reviewe

Emotional Body Language Displayed by Artificial Agents

Complex and natural social interaction between artificial agents (computer-generated or robotic) and humans necessitates the display of rich emotions in order to be believable, socially relevant, and accepted, and to generate the natural emotional responses that humans show in the context of social interaction, such as engagement or empathy. Whereas some robots use faces to display (simplified) emotional expressions, for other robots such as Nao, body language is the best medium available given their inability to convey facial expressions. Displaying emotional body language that can be interpreted whilst interacting with the robot should significantly improve naturalness. This research investigates the creation of an affect space for the generation of emotional body language to be displayed by humanoid robots. To do so, three experiments investigating how emotional body language displayed by agents is interpreted were conducted. The first experiment compared the interpretation of emotional body language displayed by humans and agents. The results showed that emotional body language displayed by an agent or a human is interpreted in a similar way in terms of recognition. Following these results, emotional key poses were extracted from an actor’s performances and implemented in a Nao robot. The interpretation of these key poses was validated in a second study where it was found that participants were better than chance at interpreting the key poses displayed. Finally, an affect space was generated by blending key poses and validated in a third study. Overall, these experiments confirmed that body language is an appropriate medium for robots to display emotions and suggest that an affect space for body expressions can be used to improve the expressiveness of humanoid robots.Peer reviewe

Multimodal Child-Robot Interaction: Building Social Bonds

For robots to interact effectively with human users they must be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social context. The Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction (ALIZ-E) project focuses on the design of long-term, adaptive social interaction between robots and child users in real-world settings. In this paper, we report on the iterative approach taken to scientific and technical developments toward this goal: advancing individual technical competencies and integrating them to form an autonomous robotic system for evaluation “in the wild.” The first evaluation iterations have shown the potential of this methodology in terms of adaptation of the robot to the interactant and the resulting influences on engagement. This sets the foundation for an ongoing research program that seeks to develop technologies for social robot companions