147 research outputs found
Can my robotic home cleaner be happy? Issues about emotional expression in non-bio-inspired robots.
In many robotic applications a robot body should have a functional shape that cannot include bio-inspired elements, but it would still be important that the robot can express emotions, moods, or a character, to make it acceptable, and to involve its users. Dynamic signals from movement can be exploited to provide this expression, while the robot is acting to perform its task. A research effort has been started to find general emotion expression models for actions that could be applied to any kind of robot to obtain believable and easily detectable emotional expressions. On his path, the need for a unified representation of emotional expression emerged. A framework to define action characteristics that could be used to represent emotions is proposed in this paper. Guidelines are provided to identify quantitative models and numerical values for parameters, which can be used to design and engineer emotional robot actions. A set of robots having different shapes, movement possibilities, and goals have been implemented following these guidelines. Thanks to the proposed framework, different models to implement emotional expression could now be compared in a sound way. The question mentioned in the title can now be answered in a justified way
Making playing robots for persons with disabilities
Play enables the development of skills and abilities in a way that brings satisfaction and enjoyment. Play is a right for everyone, but it is often negated to persons with disabilities both because their time is dedicated to other activities, such as therapies, and because of lack of appropriate tools and companions to play with. Robots have been proven as effective means to support development in persons with disabilities, since they provide unique opportunities and strong engagement. We present a framework to develop play situations based on robots and its application on some settings, with the aim of showing how effective, playful robots can be developed also using low-level technology at a relatively low cost. This may be a way to produce ad-hoc tools, adapted to specific situations, and, at the same time, to share experiences and ideas to foster the development of robots that can hardly reach a real market
Timing Issues in Physically Interacting RoboGames
In Physically Interactive RoboGames (PIRG) human players
interact with autonomous robots in a game context, where
all have to move to play their respective roles. As in regular
children games and in videogames, timing plays a fundamental
role both for the performance in the game, and for
the relationship that is established among players. In this
paper, some experiences about designing timing aspects in
different PIRGs are reported, and it is put in evidence when
timing is critical and its design needs special care. Timing
aspects are described and discussed
Towards a Framework for Embodying Any-Body through Sensory Translation and Proprioceptive Remapping: A Pilot Study
We address the problem of physical avatar embodiment and investi-
gate the most general factors that may allow a person to “wear” an-
other body, different from her own. A general approach is required
to exploit the fact that an avatar can have any kind of body. With
this pilot study we introduce a conceptual framework for the design
of non-anthropomorphic embodiment, to foster immersion and
user engagement. The person is interfaced with the avatar, a robot,
through a system that induces a divergent internal sensorimotor
mapping while controlling the avatar, to create an immersive expe-
rience. Together with the conceptual framework, we present two
implementations: a prototype tested in the lab and an interactive in-
stallation exhibited to general public. These implementations consist
of a wheeled robot, and control and sensory feedback systems. The
control system includes mechanisms that both detect and resist the
user’s movement, increasing the sense of connection with the avatar;
the feedback system is a virtual reality (VR) environment represent-
ing the avatar’s unique perception, combining sensor and control in-
formation to generate visual cues. Data gathered from users indicate
that the systems implemented following the proposed framework
create a challenging and engaging experience, thus providing solid
ground for further developments
Uncertainty Maximization in Partially Observable Domains: A Cognitive Perspective
Faced with an ever-increasing complexity of their domains of application,
artificial learning agents are now able to scale up in their ability to process
an overwhelming amount of information coming from their interaction with an
environment. However, this process of scaling does come with a cost of encoding
and processing an increasing amount of redundant information that is not
necessarily beneficial to the learning process itself. This work exploits the
properties of the learning systems defined over partially observable domains by
selectively focusing on the specific type of information that is more likely to
express the causal interaction among the transitioning states of the
environment. Adaptive masking of the observation space based on the
criterion enabled a significant
improvement in convergence of temporal difference algorithms defined over a
partially observable Markov process
Safety experiments for small robots investigating the potential of soft materials in mitigating the harm to the head due to impacts
There is a growing interest in social robots to be considered in the therapy
of children with autism due to their effectiveness in improving the outcomes.
However, children on the spectrum exhibit challenging behaviors that need to be
considered when designing robots for them. A child could involuntarily throw a
small social robot during meltdown and that could hit another person's head and
cause harm (e.g. concussion). In this paper, the application of soft materials
is investigated for its potential in attenuating head's linear acceleration
upon impact. The thickness and storage modulus of three different soft
materials were considered as the control factors while the noise factor was the
impact velocity. The design of experiments was based on Taguchi method. A total
of 27 experiments were conducted on a developed dummy head setup that reports
the linear acceleration of the head. ANOVA tests were performed to analyze the
data. The findings showed that the control factors are not statistically
significant in attenuating the response. The optimal values of the control
factors were identified using the signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio optimization
technique. Confirmation runs at the optimal parameters (i.e. thickness of 3 mm
and 5 mm) showed a better response as compared to other conditions. Designers
of social robots should consider the application of soft materials to their
designs as it help in reducing the potential harm to the head
Modular development of mobile robots with open source hardware and software components
Prototyping and engineering robot hardware and low-level control often require time and efforts thus subtracted to core research activities, such as SLAM or planning algorithms development, which need a working, reliable, platform to be evaluated in a real world scenario. In this paper, we present Rapid Robot Prototyping (R2P), an open source, hardware and software architecture for the rapid prototyping of robotic applications, where off-the-shelf embedded modules (e.g., sensors, actuators, and controllers) are combined together in a plug-and-play fashion, enabling the implementation of a complex system in a simple and modular way. R2P makes people involved in robotics, from researchers and designers to students and hobbyists, dramatically reduce the time and efforts required to build a robot prototype
Towards enriching robot's actions with affective movements
Emotions are considered by many researchers as beneficial in social robotics, since they can enrich human-robot interaction with non-verbal clues. Although there have been works that have studied emotion expression in robotics, the mechanisms created to project emotion are usually highly integrated in each solution. This limits the possibility to develop a general approach. This paper presents a system that has been initially created for a theatrical robot to enrich its actions with emotions, but it has been designed to be adaptable to other fields. The emotional enrichment system has been envisioned to be used with any action decision system
Robots showing emotions: Emotion representation with no bio-inspired body
Robots should be able to represent emotional states to interact with people as social agents. There are cases where robots cannot have bio-inspired bodies, for instance because the task to be performed requires a special shape, as in the case of home cleaners, package carriers, and many others. In these cases, emotional states have to be represented by exploiting movements of the body. In this paper, we present a set of case studies aimed at identifying specific values to convey emotion trough changes in linear and angular velocities, which might be applied on different non-anthropomorphic bodies. This work originates from some of the most considered emotion expression theories and from emotion coding for people. We show that people can recognize some emotional expressions better than others, and we propose some directions to express emotions exploiting only bio-neutral movement
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