Investigating the influence of situations and expectations on user behavior : empirical analyses in human-robot interaction

Lohse M. Investigating the influence of situations and expectations on user behavior : empirical analyses in human-robot interaction. Bielefeld (Germany): Bielefeld University; 2010.Social sciences are becoming increasingly important for robotics research as work goes on to enable service robots to interact with inexperienced users. This endeavor can only be successful if the robots learn to interpret the users' behavior reliably and, in turn, provide feedback for the users, which enables them to understand the robot. In order to achieve this goal, the thesis introduces an approach to describe the interaction situation as a dynamic construct with different levels of specificity. The situation concept is the starting point for a model which aims to explain the users' behavior. The second important component of the model is the expectations of the users with respect to the robot. Both the situation and the expectations are shown to be the main determinants of the users' behaviors. With this theoretical background in mind, the thesis examines interactions from a home tour scenario in which a human teaches a robot about rooms and objects within them. To analyze the human expectations and behaviors in this situation, two main novel methods have been developed. In particular, a quantitative method for the analysis of the users' behavior repertoires (speech, gesture, eye gaze, body orientation, etc.) is introduced. The approach focuses on the interaction level, which describes the interplay between the robot and the user. In the second novel method, also the system level is taken into account, which includes the robot components and their interplay. This method serves for a detailed task analysis and helps to identify problems that occur in the interaction. By applying these methods, the thesis contributes to the identification of underlying expectations that allow future behavior of the users to be predicted in particular situations. Knowledge about the users' behavior repertoires serves as a cue for the robot about the state of the interaction and the task the users aim to accomplish. Therefore, it enables robot developers to adapt the interaction models of the components to the situation, actual user expectations, and behaviors. The work provides a deeper understanding of the role of expectations in human-robot interaction and contributes to the interaction and system design of interactive robots

How a Guide Robot Should Behave at an Airport - Insights Based on Observing Passengers

As part of the EU FP7 project SPENCER a robot demonstrator will be developed which provides location based services (information, guiding) to passengers in the context of an international airport. In this report we describe a contextual analysis, conducted in order to discover how people behave in a given context (here Schiphol airport) and in relevant situations within this context. From this analysis we arrive at guidelines for robot behavior

Short duration robot interaction at an airport: challenges from a socio-psychological point of view

This extended abstract concerns the FP7-project Spencer. As part of the Spencer project, a demonstrator robot will be developed which provide services to passengers at a major European airport. Example services include (1) guiding transfer passengers from their arrival gate to the so-called Schengen barrier, and (2) assisting in the transfer process by printing boarding passes. The goal of the robot is to make sure that passengers will make their connecting flight, with our own focus being on the human-robot interaction. In the following, we describe a sample use case of the project scenario. Based on this we identify possible challenges that are of interest with respect to interactive robots in public spaces

Position paper: robots as companions and therapists in elderly care

Given the increasing portion of elderly people in the western world and severe lacks in care-taking, we believe that we should research possibilities to employ robots in elderly care. Social robots could offer companionship as well as treatment of physical and psychological disturbances. In our research, we propose to adapt treatments from positive psychology to robots in order to increase the wellbeing of elderly people in the long run. In a first study, we suggest that the role that the users will subscribe to the robot (therapist or companion) might make a severe difference on the effectiveness of the treatment and the social acceptance of the robot systems

Robots for the psychological wellbeing of the elderly

The present paper examines the potential robots may have to motivate and support elderly people psychologically. Two short- and long-term research scenarios are proposed where a robot interacts with an elderly person offering psychological support. We describe one experiment that was carried out probing the short-term scenario. Another study currently under development is also presented, which is based on the long-term scenario. The two scenarios have advantages and disadvantages and appear as complementary to each other

Exploring child-robot engagement in a collaborative task

Imagine a room with toys scattered on the floor and a robot that is motivating a small group of children to tidy up. This scenario poses real-world challenges for the robot, e.g., the robot needs to navigate autonomously in a cluttered environment, it needs to classify and grasp objects, and it needs to interact with the children and adapt its behaviors to the children's group dynamics. Within the EU FP7 project SQUIRREL, we aim to address these challenges and develop a robot for children (4-10 years old) that cannot only perform complex navigation and manipulation tasks in a cluttered environment, but is also affectively and socially intelligent, engaging and fun in a collaborative task. We currently focus on designing appropriate robot interaction styles for a small group of children and evaluating the levels of fun and engagement in child-robot and child-child interactions

Robots guiding small groups: the effect of appearance change on the user experience

In this paper we present an exploratory user study in which a robot guided small groups of two to three people. We manipulated the appearance of the robot in terms of the position of a tablet providing information (facing the group that was guided or the walking direction) and the type of information displayed (eyes or route information). Our results indicate that users preferred eyes on a display that faced the walking direction and route information on a display that faced them. The study gave us strong indication to believe that people are not in favor of eyes looking at them during the guiding

2nd Workshop on Evaluating Child Robot Interaction

Many researchers have started to explore natural interaction scenarios for children. No matter if these children are normally developing or have special needs, evaluating Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) is a challenge. To find methods that work well and provide reliable data is difficult, for example because commonly used methods such as questionnaires donot work well particularly with younger children. Previous research has shown that children need support in expressing how they feel about technology. Given this, researchers often choose time-consuming behavioral measures from observations to evaluate CRI. However, these are not necessarily comparable between studies and robots. This workshop aims to bring together researchers from differentdisciplines to share their experiences on these aspects. The main topics are methods to evaluate child-robot interaction design, methods to evaluate socially assistive child-robot interaction and multi-modal evaluation of child-robot interaction. Connected questions that we would like to tackle are for example: i) What are reliable metrics in CRI' ii) How can we overcome the pitfalls of survey methods in CRI' iii) How can we integrate qualitative approaches in CRI' iv) What are the best practices for in the wild studies with children? Looking across disciplinary boundaries, we want to discuss advantages and short-comings of using different evaluation methods in order to compile guidelines for future CRI research. This workshop is the second in a series that started at the International Conference on Social Robotics in 2015

Vocal turn-taking patterns in groups of children performing collaborative tasks: an exploratory study

Since children (5-9 years old) are still developing their emotional and social skills, their social interactional behaviors in small groups might differ from adults' interactional behaviors. In order to develop a robot that is able to support children performing collaborative tasks in small groups, it is necessary to gain a better understanding of how children interact with each other. We were interested in investigating vocal turn-taking patterns as we expect these to reveal relations to collaborative and conflict behaviors, especially with children behaviors as previous literature suggests. To that end, we collected an audiovisual corpus of children performing collaborative tasks together in groups of three. Through automatic turn-taking analyses, our results showed that speaker changes with overlaps are more common than without overlaps and children seemed to show smoother turn-taking patterns, i.e., less frequent and longer lasting speaker changes, during collaborative than conflict behaviors