Does A Loss of Social Credibility Impact Robot Safety?

This position paper discusses the safety-related functions performed by assistive robots and explores the relationship between trust and effective safety risk mitigation. We identify a measure of the robot’s social effectiveness, termed social credibility, and present a discussion of how social credibility may be gained and lost. This paper’s contribution is the identification of a link between social credibility and safety-related performance. Accordingly, we draw on analyses of existing systems to demonstrate how an assistive robot’s safety-critical functionality can be impaired by a loss of social credibility. In addition, we present a discussion of some of the consequences of prioritising either safety-related functionality or social engagement. We propose the identification of a mixed-criticality scheduling algorithm in order to maximise both safety-related performance and social engagement

Humans' Perception of a Robot Moving Using a Slow in and Slow Out Velocity Profile

© 2019 IEEE - All rights reservedHumans need to understand and trust the robots they are working with. We hypothesize that how a robot moves can impact people’s perception and their trust. We present a methodology for a study to explore people’s perception of a robot using the animation principle of slow in, slow out—to change the robot’s velocity profile versus a robot moving using a linear velocity profile. Study participants will interact with the robot within a home context to complete a task while the robot moves around the house. The participants’ perceptions of the robot will be recorded using the Godspeed Questionnaire. A pilot study shows that it is possible to notice the difference between the linear and the slow in, slow out velocity profiles, so the full experiment planned with participants will allow us to compare their perceptions based on the two observable behaviors.Final Accepted Versio

Approaching human-like spatial awareness in social robotics: an investigation of spatial interaction strategies with a receptionist robot

Holthaus P. Approaching human-like spatial awareness in social robotics: an investigation of spatial interaction strategies with a receptionist robot. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld.; 2014.This doctoral thesis investigates the influence of social signals in the spatial domain that aim to raise a robot’s awareness towards its human interlocutor. A concept of spatial awareness thereby extends the robot’s possibilities for expressing its knowledge about the situation as well as its own capabilities. As a result, especially untrained users can build up more appropriate expectations about the current situation which supposedly leads to a minimization of misunderstandings and thereby an enhancement of user experience. On the background of research that investigates communication among humans, relations are drawn in order to utilize gained insights for developing a robot that is capable of acting socially intelligent with regard to human-like treatment of spatial configurations and signals. In a study-driven approach, an integrated concept of spatial awareness is therefore proposed. An important aspect of that concept, which is founded in its spatial extent, lies in its aspiration to cover a holistic encounter between human and robot with the goal to improve user experience from the first sight until the end of reciprocal awareness. It describes how spatial configurations and signals can be perceived and interpreted in a social robot. Furthermore, it also presents signals and behavioral properties for such a robot that target at influencing said configurations and enhancing robot verbosity. In order to approve the concept’s validity in realistic settings, an interactive scenario is presented in the form of a receptionist robot to which it is applied. In the context of this setup, a comprehensive user study is conducted that verifies the implementation of spatial awareness to be beneficial for an interaction with humans that are naive to the subject. Furthermore, the importance of addressing an entire encounter in human-robot interaction is confirmed as well as a strong interdependency of a robot’s social signals among each other

Movement Acts in Breakdown Situations : How a Robot’s Recovery Procedure Affects Participants’ Opinions

Funding Information: Funding information : This research was partly funded by the Research Council of Norway as part of the Multimodal Elderly Care Systems (MECS) project, under grant agreement 247697. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Trenton Schulz et al., published by De Gruyter.Recovery procedures are targeted at correcting issues encountered by robots. What are people’s opinions of a robot during these recovery procedures? During an experiment that examined how a mobile robot moved, the robot would unexpectedly pause or rotate itself to recover from a navigation problem. The serendipity of the recovery procedure and people’s understanding of it became a case study to examine how future study designs could consider breakdowns better and look at suggestions for better robot behaviors in such situations. We present the original experiment with the recovery procedure. We then examine the responses from the participants in this experiment qualitatively to see how they interpreted the breakdown situation when it occurred. Responses could be grouped into themes of sentience, competence, and the robot’s forms. The themes indicate that the robot’s movement communicated different information to different participants. This leads us to introduce the concept of movement acts to help examine the explicit and implicit parts of communication in movement. Given that we developed the concept looking at an unexpected breakdown, we suggest that researchers should plan for the possibility of breakdowns in experiments and examine and report people’s experience around a robot breakdown to further explore unintended robot communication.Peer reviewe

Differences of Human Perceptions of a Robot Moving using Linear or Slow in, Slow out Velocity Profiles When Performing a Cleaning Task

We investigated how a robot moving with different velocity profiles affects a person's perception of it when working together on a task. The two profiles are the standard linear profile and a profile based on the animation principles of slow in, slow out. The investigation was accomplished by running an experiment in a home context where people and the robot cooperated on a clean-up task. We used the Godspeed series of questionnaires to gather people's perception of the robot. Average scores for each series appear not to be different enough to reject the null hypotheses, but looking at the component items provides paths to future areas of research. We also discuss the scenario for the experiment and how it may be used for future research into using animation techniques for moving robots and improving the legibility of a robot's locomotion

Communicative Robot Signals: Presenting a New Typology for Human-Robot Interaction

© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/We present a new typology for classifying signals from robots when they communicate with humans. For inspiration, we use ethology, the study of animal behaviour and previous efforts from literature as guides in defining the typology. The typology is based on communicative signals that consist of five properties: the origin where the signal comes from, the deliberateness of the signal, the signal's reference, the genuineness of the signal, and its clarity (i.e. how implicit or explicit it is). Using the accompanying worksheet, the typology is straightforward to use to examine communicative signals from previous human-robot interactions and provides guidance for designers to use the typology when designing new robot behaviours

#UKRAS21: The 4th UK Robotics and Autonomous Systems Conference

© The Author(s) / UK-RAS Network. This is an open access conference paper distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This year’s theme focuses on robotics at home. We haveidentified three focus areas to examine robotics and au-tonomous systems within our call for papers that are eachcovered by an inspiring keynote and four oral presentationsfrom authors of accepted papers: The focus area robotics foruse in the home considers aspects of rapid prototyping, safety,assisted living, rehabilitation robotics, technology acceptance,and diverse user groups. Keynote speaker Prof. Ana Paiva (In-stituto Superior T´ecnico, University of Lisbon and coordinatorof GAIPS at INESC-ID) will talk about the engineering ofsociality and collaboration between humans and robots. The oral paper presentations in this area are Exploring Human-Dog Attachment Behaviours and their Translation to a Roboti

Direct On-Line Imitation of Human Faces with Hierarchical ART Networks

Holthaus P, Wachsmuth S. Direct On-Line Imitation of Human Faces with Hierarchical ART Networks. In: 2013 IEEE RO-MAN. The 22nd International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE; 2013: 370-371.This work-in-progress paper presents an on-line system for robotic heads capable of mimicking humans. The marker-less method solely depends on the interactant’s face as an input and does not use a set of basic emotions and is thus capable of displaying a large variety of facial expressions. A preliminary evaluation assigns solid performance with potential for improvement

How do Human Users Teach a Continual Learning Robot in Repeated Interactions?

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Competitive Agents for Intelligent Home Automation

Michalski T, Pohling M, Holthaus P. Competitive Agents for Intelligent Home Automation. In: HAI'17 - Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction. 2017: 527-531.Technologies that aim to achieve intelligent automation in smart homes typically involve either trigger-action pairs or machine learning. These, however, are often complex to configure or hard to comprehend for the user. To maximize automation efficiency while keeping the configuration simple and the effects comprehensible, we thus explore an alternative agent-based approach. With the help of a survey, we put together a set of intelligent agents that act autonomously in the environment. Conflicts between behaviors, identified with a secondary study, are thereby resolved with a competitive combination of agents. We finally present the draft of a user interface that allows for individual configuration of all agents