How Do You Like Me in This: User Embodiment Preferences for Companion Agents

We investigate the relationship between the embodiment of an artificial companion and user perception and interaction with it. In a Wizard of Oz study, 42 users interacted with one of two embodiments: a physical robot or a virtual agent on a screen through a role-play of secretarial tasks in an office, with the companion providing essential assistance. Findings showed that participants in both condition groups when given the choice would prefer to interact with the robot companion, mainly for its greater physical or social presence. Subjects also found the robot less annoying and talked to it more naturally. However, this preference for the robotic embodiment is not reflected in the users’ actual rating of the companion or their interaction with it. We reflect on this contradiction and conclude that in a task-based context a user focuses much more on a companion’s behaviour than its embodiment. This underlines the feasibility of our efforts in creating companions that migrate between embodiments while maintaining a consistent identity from the user’s point of view

Robot education peers in a situated primary school study: personalisation promotes child learning

The benefit of social robots to support child learning in an educational context over an extended period of time is evaluated. Specifically, the effect of personalisation and adaptation of robot social behaviour is assessed. Two autonomous robots were embedded within two matched classrooms of a primary school for a continuous two week period without experimenter supervision to act as learning companions for the children for familiar and novel subjects. Results suggest that while children in both personalised and non-personalised conditions learned, there was increased child learning of a novel subject exhibited when interacting with a robot that personalised its behaviours, with indications that this benefit extended to other class-based performance. Additional evidence was obtained suggesting that there is increased acceptance of the personalised robot peer over a non-personalised version. These results provide the first evidence in support of peer-robot behavioural personalisation having a positive influence on learning when embedded in a learning environment for an extended period of time

Drumming with a humanoid robot : lessons learnt from designing and analysing human-robot interaction studies

Copyright Association for the Advancement of Artificial IntelligenceWe summarize methodological and experimental design issues related to three human-robot interaction studies investigating a drumming experience with Kaspar, a humanoid child-sized robot, and (in total 116) human participants. Our aim1 is not to have Kaspar just replicate the human’s drumming but to engage in a ‘social manner’ in a call and response turn-taking interaction. This requires the set up of enjoyable as well as (as much as possible) controlled experiments. Two Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) experiments with adult participants and one experiment with primary school children were carried out to investigate different aspects of such interactions. We briefly summarize issues concerning experimental methodology and design, as well as ethical, legal, safety issues in addition to many ‘practical’ challenges of setting up and conducting HRI experiments with an autonomous humanoid robot

Drumming with a humanoid robot : results from human-robot interaction studies

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/LAB-RS.2008.11Final Accepted Versio

Emergent dynamics of turn-taking interaction in drumming games with a humanoid robot

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/ROMAN.2008.460069

Drum-mate: A Human-Humanoid Drumming Experience

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/ICHR.2007.4813875We present an exploratory study investigating a drumming experience with Kaspar, a humanoid child-sized robot, and a human. In this work, our aim is not to have Kaspar just replicate the human partner's drumming, but to engage with the human in a dasiasocial mannerpsila using head gestures in a call and response turn-taking interaction and to assess the impact of non-verbal gestures on the interaction. Results from the first implementation of a human-robot interaction experiment are presented and analysed qualitatively (in terms of participants' subjective experiences) and quantitatively (concerning the drumming performance of the human-robot pair). The interaction experience is discussed in terms of imitation, turn-taking, and the effect of gender differences.Peer reviewe

An experimental investigation of interference effects in human-humanoid interaction games

“This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. In most cases, these works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder." “Copyright IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.” DOI: 10.1109/ROMAN.2009.5326342Investigating how people respond to and relate to robots is a multifaceted scientific challenge. This paper reports on an experimental investigation concerning movement interference effects between a human and a robot. We compare results with that obtained by Oztop et al., however, in our study we used a small child-sized robot (KASPAR) with an overall human-like appearance. The experiment was conducted with both child and adult participants who interacted with a small humanoid robot using arm waving behaviours. The experimental setup was designed to be less constrained than in with an emphasis on playful interaction. The experimental results did not show evidence for interference effects. This might be due to a more game-like and less constrained experimental environment or to the specific features of the robot or both. In addition to measurements of the variance of the movements, we investigated a measure for behavioural synchrony between human and robot movements based on the concept of information distance. The results of information distance analysis indicated that most of the human participants were affected by the robot's behavioural rhythms. While our experiments did not show a movement interference effect, we found behavioural adaptation of participants' movement timing to the robot's movements. Thus, the measure of behavioural synchrony that we introduced appears useful for complementing other measures (such as variance) previously used in the literature

As time goes by: representing and reasoning about timing in human-robot interaction studies

Original article can be found at: http://www.aaai.org/Press/Reports/Symposia/Spring/ss-10-06.php Copyright AAAI [Full text of this paper is not available in the UHRA]We summarise the experimental design issues related to timing in several human-robot interaction scenarios investigating turn-taking or synchronization between child-sized humanoid robots and human participants. Our aim1 is not to have the humanoid robots just replicate the human's behaviours (e.g. waving, peek-a-boo, or drumming), but to engage in interactions in a socially appropriate manner. From these various studies, we have identified several ways in which time has an impact on interaction. We have also identified practical concerns about data collection for time-dependent interactions and ways to address them. The conclusions drawn from this work is likely to be useful in informing the design of systems which engage in synchronized or turn-taking interactions with people. © 2010, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence

Robot-Mediated Interviews - How Effective Is a Humanoid Robot as a Tool for Interviewing Young Children?

Copyright: 2013 Wood et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedRobots have been used in a variety of education, therapy or entertainment contexts. This paper introduces the novel application of using humanoid robots for robot-mediated interviews. An experimental study examines how children's responses towards the humanoid robot KASPAR in an interview context differ in comparison to their interaction with a human in a similar setting. Twenty-one children aged between 7 and 9 took part in this study. Each child participated in two interviews, one with an adult and one with a humanoid robot. Measures include the behavioural coding of the children's behaviour during the interviews and questionnaire data. The questions in these interviews focused on a special event that had recently taken place in the school. The results reveal that the children interacted with KASPAR very similar to how they interacted with a human interviewer. The quantitative behaviour analysis reveal that the most notable difference between the interviews with KASPAR and the human were the duration of the interviews, the eye gaze directed towards the different interviewers, and the response time of the interviewers. These results are discussed in light of future work towards developing KASPAR as an 'interviewer' for young children in application areas where a robot may have advantages over a human interviewer, e.g. in police, social services, or healthcare applications. © 2013 Wood et al.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio