People's Perception of Domestic Service Robots: Same Household, Same Opinion?

The study presented in this paper examined people’s perception of domestic service robots by means of an ethnographic study. We investigated initial reactions of nine households who lived with a Roomba vacuum cleaner robot over a two week period. To explore people’s attitude and how it changed over time, we used a recurring questionnaire that was filled at three different times, integrated in 18 semi-structured qualitative interviews. Our findings suggest that being part of a specific household has an impact how each individual household member perceives the robot. We interpret that, even though individual experiences with the robot might differ from one other, a household shares a specific opinion about the robot. Moreover our findings also indicate that how people perceived Roomba did not change drastically over the two week period

Using keystroke logging to understand writers’ processes on a reading-into-writing test

Background Integrated reading-into-writing tasks are increasingly used in large-scale language proficiency tests. Such tasks are said to possess higher authenticity as they reflect real-life writing conditions better than independent, writing-only tasks. However, to effectively define the reading-into-writing construct, more empirical evidence regarding how writers compose from sources both in real-life and under test conditions is urgently needed. Most previous process studies used think aloud or questionnaire to collect evidence. These methods rely on participants’ perceptions of their processes, as well as their ability to report them. Findings This paper reports on a small-scale experimental study to explore writers’ processes on a reading-into-writing test by employing keystroke logging. Two L2 postgraduates completed an argumentative essay on computer. Their text production processes were captured by a keystroke logging programme. Students were also interviewed to provide additional information. Keystroke logging like most computing tools provides a range of measures. The study examined the students’ reading-into-writing processes by analysing a selection of the keystroke logging measures in conjunction with students’ final texts and interview protocols. Conclusions The results suggest that the nature of the writers’ reading-into-writing processes might have a major influence on the writer’s final performance. Recommendations for future process studies are provided

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

Presence, workload and performance effects of synthetic environment design factors

There remains a limited understanding of factors in presence and its relation to performance. This research examined a range of synthetic environment (SE) design features (viewpoint, auditory cue type and visual background) suspected to influence presence, and evaluated differences in presence, workload and task performance caused by manipulations of the factors and task difficulty in a virtualreality-based basketball free-throw task. Thirty-two research participants were also required to perform secondary-monitoring tasks to assess attention allocation to the virtual and (surrounding) real environments, as an indicator of presence. Analysis of variance results demonstrated immersiveness (viewpoint) and auditory cue type to significantly influence the sense of subjective presence and perceptions of workload. Virtual task performance was significantly affected by task difficultly. This study also provided further evidence of significant positive relations between presence and workload, but no evidence of a correlation of objective presence and performance. These results have general applicability for the design of multimodal SE-based interfaces for real-world tasks, such as telerobot control

Human-robot interaction for service robots

Service robots or personal robots are to be used by non-expert users. This requires special attention to the human-robot interaction to provide systems that people are comfortable to use and be around. In this paper a number of different modalities for human-robot interaction are presented and a few systems that exploit such interfaces are outlined. These systems have been used for initial studies of use with non-expert users, the results are briefly summarised and issues for future research are outlined.

Evaluating extrovert and introvert behaviour of a domestic robot : a video study

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research is here presented into social robots that have to be able to interact with inexperienced users. In the design of these robots many research findings of human-human interaction and human-computer interaction are adopted but the direct applicability of these theories is limited because a robot is different from both humans and computers. Therefore, new methods have to be developed in HRI in order to build robots that are suitable for inexperienced users. In this paper we present a video study we conducted employing our robot BIRON (BIelefeld RObot companioN) which is designed for use in domestic environments. Subjects watched the system during the interaction with a human and rated two different robot behaviours (extrovert and introvert). The behaviours differed regarding verbal output and person following of the robot. Aiming to improve human-robot interaction, participants’ ratings of the behaviours were evaluated and compared