Sensorimotor paradigms for design of movement and social interaction

The human brain has evolved for governing motor activity by transforming sensory patterns to patterns of motor coordination. Movement, as a basic bodily expression of this governing function is shown to underlie higher cognitive processes and social interaction.There are three prevailing concepts of sensorimotor interaction that set up different frameworks for design of artificial movement. This paper focuses on the common coding [1??] paradigm of sensorimotor interaction as justified by recent experimental studies on the mirror neuron system. It aims to provide a novel approach to design of movement interactions in an inter-agent setting

Social interaction in robotic agents emulating the mirror neuron function

Emergent interactions that are expressed by the movements of two agents are discussed in this paper. The common coding principle is used to show how the mirror neuron system may facilitate interaction behaviour. Synchronization between neuron groups in different structures of the mirror neuron system are in the basis of the interaction behaviour. The robotics experimental setting is used to illustrate the method. The resulting synchronization and turn taking behaviours show the advantages of the mirror neuron paradigm for designing of socially meaningful behaviour

Humanoid robots are retrieving emotion from motion analysis

\u3cp\u3eThis paper presents an application for hand waving in real time using a parallel framework. Analysis of 15 different video fragments demonstrates that acceleration and frequency are relevant parameters for emotion classification of hand waving. Its solution will be used for human-robot interaction with the aim of training autistic children social behavioral skills in a natural environment.\u3c/p\u3

My drama : story-based game for understanding emotions in context

This paper presents My Drama, a story-based game application that helps to understand emotions in context. The game was developed for young people with autism, who usually have trouble understanding the non-verbal expression of emotions. We combined elements of drama therapy and mobile game design to let players experience taking perspectives by assuming the role of the cartoon character and practice context-dependent recognition of expressed emotions in the story, and collecting of related to the story emotional expression photographs n in a known environment. The outcomes of a pilot test indicate that My Drama is a promising and engaging training tool for emotion understanding while collecting of emotional expression photographs increased the communication. Long-term research on its effectiveness is needed

Boxing against drones:Drones in sports education

\u3cp\u3eThis paper investigates how drones could be integrated into the context of sports, boxing in particular. The goal of this project is to design a drone application that allows direct and embodied interaction. The sport of boxing provides a very interesting setting, because the intimidating and dangerous appearance of the drone could be beneficial when it is used as a boxing opponent. A concept of a drone box application was developed and a pilot experiment was performed to compare drone against human boxing with human against human boxing. It was found that even in a simple exercise, the present day drone technology wasn't fast and precise enough to provide a fluent sparring experience. A positive outcome was that participants did complete and enjoy the exercise in both cases. Present day drones could be used for boxing exercises in which no or minimum impact is required.\u3c/p\u3

Interplay between natural and artificial intelligence in training autistic children with robots

\u3cp\u3eThe need to understand and model human-like behavior and intelligence has been embraced by a multidisciplinary community for several decades. The success so far has been shown in solutions for a concrete task or a competence, and these solutions are seldom a truly multidisciplinary effort. In this paper we analyze the needs and the opportunities for combining artificial intelligence and bio-inspired computation within an application domain that provides a cluster of solutions instead of searching for a solution to a single task. We analyze applications of training children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) with a humanoid robot, because it must include multidisciplinary effort and at the same time there is a clear need for better models of human-like behavior which will be tested in real life scenarios through these robots. We designed, implemented, and carried out three applied behavior analysis (ABA) based robot interventions. All interventions aim to promote self initiated social behavior in children with ASD. We found out that the standardization of the robot training scenarios and using unified robot platforms can be an enabler for integrating multiple intelligent and bio-inspired algorithms for creation of tailored, but domain specific robot skills and competencies. This approach might set a new trend to how artificial and bio-inspired robot applications develop. We suggest that social computing techniques are a pragmatic solution to creation of standardized training scenarios and therefore enable the replacement of perceivably intelligent robot behaviors with truly intelligent ones.\u3c/p\u3

Designing a system of interactive robots for training collaborative skills to autistic children

Using robots to reward and stimulate children doing tasks together can be helpful in improving their social skills. Robots implemented 3 types of behavior scenarios – imitate, enhance and counteract – in a collaborative game of teaching robots perform movements shown by hand gestures. The paper presents a novel account of ASD symptoms based on the interplay of empathic concern and empathic accuracy in different personalities with and without cognitive deficits. Performance of autistic children was compared with two age groups of typically developing children – under and above the age of 7. The study confirmed the limited resource hypothesis – cognitive and motivational – bringing about the observed phenomena in situations of limited attention resources and performance under distraction. The robotic framework for educating children has shown potential for developing of various complex cognitive and social skills and has substantial developmental impact

Social training of autistic children with interactive intelligent agents

The ability of autistic children to learn by applying logical rules has been used widely in behavioral therapies for social training. We propose to teach social skills to autistic children through games that simultaneously stimulate social behavior and include recognition of elements of social interaction. For this purpose we created a multi-agent platform of interactive blocks, and we created appropriate games that require shared activities leading to a common goal. The games included perceiving and understanding elements of social behavior that non-autistic children can recognize. We argue that the importance of elements of social interaction such as perceiving interaction behaviors and assigning metaphoric meanings has been overlooked, and that they are very important in the social training of autistic children. Two games were compared by testing them with users. The first game focused only on the interaction between the agents and the other combined interaction between the agents and metaphoric meanings that are assigned to them. The results show that most of the children recognized the patterns of interaction as well as the metaphors when they were demonstrated through embodied agents and were included within games having features that engage the interest of this user group. The results also show the potential of the platform and the games to influence the social behavior of the children positivel

A cognitive model of social preferences in group interactions

\u3cp\u3eModeling the interactions in groups is becoming increasingly important in many application domains such as the design of interactive systems and social robots. Since human interactants do not always make rational choices, a good model of their social motivations is needed to explain the strategies of the interactants that are often influenced by social factors and preferences, the feeling of fairness and understanding the need for cooperation. We propose a cognitive model of social preferences of three or more interactants that are engaged in a collaborative game. The game strategies of the interactants are modeled with cooperation ratios and utility functions. We developed a new generalized utility-based approach to model the cooperation and fairness in multiplayer interactions, which uses three utility parameters. In two-person games, as it has been investigated by others, it is impossible to distinguish between fairness and cooperation in the decisions of a given player. We show that in n-person games (n> 2), and with the use of the proposed utility-based approach, it is possible to distinguish between fairness and cooperation. This makes the proposed approach suitable for more detailed analysis of group interactions in a game setting, which can better explain the social motivation of the interactants, than existing utility models and models that utilize on cooperation ratios. We show that the proposed generalization makes the newly proposed utility function less sensitive to the payoffs of one player if the size of the group grows, and test it with data from the MARS-500 isolation experiment.\u3c/p\u3

Design and evaluation of an end-user friendly tool for robot programming

End-user programming for robots is becoming an increasingly important topic since robots are being introduced into a wide variety of domains. We propose a design of a web based programming interface that makes it possible for end-users with different backgrounds to program robots using natural language. We used the cognitive dimensions framework to compare the usability of the newly created and the currently employed programming interfaces. The results showed that domain specialists are able to make robot programs more quickly and pleasantly with the proposed interface than with an existing one. Another important finding is that without physical simulation of the robot behaviours, the end-users do not feel confident enough to develop their scenarios in a realistic setting