Touching a mechanical body: tactile contact with body parts of a humanoid robot is physiologically arousing

A large literature describes the use of robots’ physical bodies to support communication with people. Touch is a natural channel for physical interaction, yet it is not understood how principles of interpersonal touch might carry over to human-robot interaction. Ten students participated in an interactive anatomy lesson with a small, humanoid robot. Participants either touched or pointed to an anatomical region of the robot in each of 26 trials while their skin conductance response was measured. Touching less accessible regions of the robot (e.g., buttocks and genitals) was more physiologically arousing than touching more accessible regions (e.g., hands and feet). No differences in physiological arousal were found when just pointing to those same anatomical regions. Social robots can elicit tactile responses in human physiology, a result that signals the power of robots, and should caution mechanical and interaction designers about positive and negative effects of human-robot interactions

Communicating Dominance in a Nonanthropomorphic Robot Using Locomotion

Dominance is a key aspect of interpersonal relationships. To what extent do nonverbal indicators related to dominance status translate to a nonanthropomorphic robot? An experiment (N = 25) addressed whether a mobile robot's motion style can influence people's perceptions of its status. Using concepts from improv theater literature, we developed two motion styles across three scenarios (robot makes lateral motions, approaches, and departs) to communicate a robot's dominance status through nonverbal expression. In agreement with the literature, participants described a motion style that was fast, in the foreground, and more animated as higher status than a motion style that was slow, in the periphery, and less animated. Participants used fewer negative emotion words to describe the robot with the purportedly high-status movements versus the purportedly low-status movements, but used more negative emotion words to describe the robot when it made departing motions that occurred in the same style. This result provides evidence that guidelines from improvisational theater for using nonverbal expression to perform interpersonal status can be applied to influence perception of a nonanthropomorphic robot's status, thus suggesting that useful models for more complicated behaviors might similarly be derived from performance literature and theory

How Culture and Presence of a Robot Affect Teachers’ Use of Touch with Autistic Children

We quantitatively analyze and compare how teachers in Serbia and the UK use physical contact to guide autistic children through an activity with and without a robot. We annotated 40 videos from the DE-ENIGMA dataset of autistic children interacting with or without a robot in the presence of an adult teacher in Serbia or the UK. Results show touch was widely used in both countries and more when the robot was not present. Culture affected where touch occurred, while the robot affected touch style

Closeness with Robots as Social Partners

HRI researchers have explored how people behave toward technology agents, advancing the concept that people can attain 'closeness' with technology itself in addition to a living social partner. Yet the topic of closeness with robots has not been fully explored or organized into a discrete area of study. This seems particularly important to the design of robots that are expressive, to the implementation of technologies that use new social signal processing or reciprocal social touch, and to the study of how people respond to robots. This half-day workshop is a forum to discuss the future of 'closeness' with robots, conversational agents, autonomous vehicles, Internet of Things devices and other technologies that act as social partners - designs, applications, responses and societal concerns

Children's Views on Identification and Intention Communication of Self-driving Vehicles

One of the major reasons behind traffic accidents is misinterpretation among road users. Self-driving vehicles are expected to reduce these accidents, given that they are designed with all road users in mind. Recently, research on the design of vehicle-pedestrian communication has emerged, but to our knowledge, there is no research published that investigates the design of interfaces for intent communication towards child pedestrians. This paper reports the initial steps towards the examination of children's views and understandings about the appearance and intention communication of self-driving vehicles. It adopts a design inclusive methodological approach for the development of a prototype for the communication of two basic intentions: "I am going to stop" and "I am going to proceed". The initial results indicate children's need to be aware about the autonomy of the vehicle and the use of their previous experience with traffic signs for the interpretation of communicative signs of the vehicle

Eldertainment or functional necessity? How virtual agents affect the home lives of people with dementia using the Quality of Life (QOL-AD) scale

A large literature evaluates how virtual agents impact the lives of people with dementia using perceptions of technol- ogy. We assess how a home virtual agent from “Living Well with Anne” impacts the quality of life of elderly with de- mentia rather than only their perceptions of the technology. Assessing impact on life alongside technology perception is pertinent given the importance of a person’s perceived qual- ity of daily home life and that positive technology perception does not always lead to actual use. We propose an approach to evaluate assistive technology for elderly people with de- mentia by assessing impact on life using semi-structured interviews and the QOL-AD scale. A preliminary proof-of- concept study tests whether perceptions of a virtual agent, actual use of the agent and participants’ quality of life are related, and whether a virtual agent improves quality of life

PlantBot: A Social Robot Prototype to Help with Behavioral Activation in Young People with Minor Depression

The PlantBot is a home device that shows iconographic or simple lights to depict actions that it requests a young person (its user) to do as part of Behavioral Activation therapy. In this initial proto- type, a separate conversational speech agent (i.e., Amazon Alexa) is wizarded to act as a second system the user can interact with

Helping Educators Monitor Autistic Children's Progress Across Sessions: A Needfinding Study

Social robots may be beneficial to educators working with autistic children in helping to monitor the children’s progress. To identify needs for measuring and tracking progress of autistic children, we conducted interviews with nine experienced educators in Serbia and the Netherlands who work with autistic children. Responses revealed educators’ needs to identify antecedents of notable child behaviour, to have standardised measures of social skills, and to understand child behaviour across settings. We present initial design concepts how social robots could be utilised to meet these needs