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

Robotics and Autonomous Systems 54 (2006) 127–134 Learning about natural human–robot interaction styles

If we are to achieve natural human–robot interaction, we may need to complement current vision and speech interfaces. Touch may provide us with an extra tool in this quest. In this paper we demonstrate the role of touch in interaction between a robot and a human. We show how infrared sensors located on robots can be easily used to detect and distinguish human interaction, in this case interaction with individual children. This application of infrared sensors potentially has many uses; for example, in entertainment or service robotics. This system could also benefit therapy or rehabilitation, where the observation and recording of movement and interaction is important. In the long term, this technique might enable robots to adapt to individuals or individual types of user. c ○ 2006 Published by Elsevier B.V

Boekhorst, “Robots moving out of the laboratory - detecting interaction levels and human contact in noisy school environments

To achieve natural human-robot interaction robots will need to distinguish humans from other parts of the environment. In this paper we investigate how infrared sensors currently being used on a mobile robot can be used to distinguish human interaction. Different from previous work, that had been conducted under laboratory conditions involving selected children, the current study took place in noisy school environments with a mix of children. Also, while in previous work each child was only exposed once to the robot, in the current longitudinal study each child encounters the robot five times. The technique that we developed previously for detecting human contact still proved to be reliable, however results are not as clear-cut, due to noisy and rather unstructured environments that interfered with the robot’s sensor readings. We discuss expected as well as unexpected results in light of the challenge to develop robots that can operate under real-life conditions.

Robotic Control Architectures

Abstract — We describe an enactive, situated model of interaction history based around a growing, informationally selfstructured metric space of experience that is constructed and reconstructed as the robot engages in sensorimotor interactions with objects and people in its environment. The model shows aspects of development and learning through modification of the cognitive structure that forms the basis for action selection as a result of acting in the world. We describe robotic experiments showing prediction of the path of a ball and an interaction game “peekaboo”

Sharing Memories: An Experimental Investigation with Multiple Autonomous Autobiographic Agents

Abstract. The overall aim of our work is to develop a generic adaptive control architecture for autonomous intelligent agents. In our previous work we showed how a single agent's survival can benefit from autobiographic memory. In the current work we extend this work by introducing a multi-agent context. Also, w