Does anyone want to talk to me? : Reflections on the use of assistance and companion robots in care homes

Held at the AISB'15 ConventionFinal Accepted Versio

A template based user-teaching system for an Assistive Robot

Demographics issues, characterised by an increasing elderly population, are expected to be a major concern both in Europe and other countries around the world. A proposed cost and care solution to these issues has been suggested that uses assistive robots in 'smarthome' environments. The deployment of such integrated facilities presents many challenges, one of which concerns the customisation of such systems to meet the needs of the elderly person themselves. One approach is to allow the elderly person to actually teach the robot sufficient behaviours that meet their care requirements. The teaching could equally well be carried out by the elderly person's relatives or carers. The overriding premise being that teaching is both intuitive and 'non-technical'. As part of a European project investigating these issues we have deployed a commercially available robot in a fully sensorised but otherwise ordinary suburban house, and designed a non-technical teaching system, based on behavioural templates, to achieve this goal. We have evaluated this integrated system within the house with 20 participants in a Human-Robot interaction experiment. Results indicate that participants overall found the interface easy to use, and felt that they would be capable of using it in a real-life situation. There were also some salient individual differences within the sample

Differences on social acceptance of humanoid robots between Japan and the UK

Held at AISB'15 ConventionTo validate a questionnaire for measuring people's acceptance of humanoid robots in cross-cultural research (the Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire: FSQ), an online survey was conducted in both the UK and Japan including items on perceptions of the relation to the family and commitment to religions, and negative attitudes toward robots (the NARS). The results suggested that 1) the correlations between the FSQ subscale scores and NARS were sufficient, 2) the UK people felt more negative toward humanoid robots than did the Japanese people, 3) young UK people had more expectation for humanoid robots, 4) relationships between social acceptance of humanoid robots and negative attitudes toward robots in general were different between the nations and generations, and 5) there were no correlations between the FSQ subscale scores, and perception of the relation to the family and commitment to religions.Final Accepted Versio

A User study on visualization of agent migration between two companion robots

In order to provide continuous user assistance in different physical situations and circumstances, it is desirable that an agent can maintain its identity as it migrates between different physical embodiments. A user study was conducted, with 21 primary school students which investigated the use of three different visual cues to support the user's belief that they are still interacting with the same agent migrating between different robotic embodiments.Non peer reviewe

KASPAR in the wild - Initial findings from a pilot study

This extended abstract describes the initial pilot work when evaluating the use of the UH Humanoid Robot KASPAR in a specialist nursery for children with social and communication disorders. Staff and volunteers at the nursery were trained in the use of KASPAR and are currently using KASPAR in their day to day activities in the nursery. This paper focuses on the design and results from the initial interviews with the participants. Results high-light the challenges of transferring experimental technologies like KASPAR from a research setting into everyday practice

Integrating Constrained Experiments in Long-term Human-Robot Interaction using Task– and Scenario–based Prototyping

© 2015 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis© Dag Sverre Syrdal, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Kheng Lee Koay, and Wan Ching Ho. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The moral rights of the named author(s) have been asserted. Permission is granted subject to the terms of the License under which the work was published. Please check the License conditions for the work which you wish to reuse. Full and appropriate attribution must be given. This permission does not cover any third party copyrighted material which may appear in the work requested.In order to investigate how the use of robots may impact everyday tasks, 12 participants interacted with a University of Hertfordshire Sunflower robot over a period of 8 weeks in the university’s Robot House.. Participants performed two constrained tasks, one physical and one cognitive , 4 times over this period. Participant responses were recorded using a variety of measures including the System Usability Scale and the NASA Task Load Index . The use of the robot had an impact on the experienced workload of the participants differently for the two tasks, and this effect changed over time. In the physical task, there was evidence of adaptation to the robot’s behaviour. For the cognitive task, the use of the robot was experienced as more frustrating in the later weeks.Peer reviewedFinal Published versio

Video prototyping of dog-inspired non-verbal affective communication for an appearance constrained robot

Original article can be found at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org “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.”This paper presents results from a video human-robot interaction (VHRI) study in which participants viewed a video in which an appearance-constrained Pioneer robot used dog-inspired affective cues to communicate affinity and relationship with its owner and a guest using proxemics, body movement and orientation and camera orientation. The findings suggest that even with the limited modalities for non-verbal expression offered by a Pioneer robot, which does not have a dog-like appearance, these cues were effective for non-verbal affective communication

In good company? : Perception of movement synchrony of a non-anthropomorphic robot

Copyright: © 2015 Lehmann 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 credited.Recent technological developments like cheap sensors and the decreasing costs of computational power have brought the possibility of robotic home companions within reach. In order to be accepted it is vital for these robots to be able to participate meaningfully in social interactions with their users and to make them feel comfortable during these interactions. In this study we investigated how people respond to a situation where a companion robot is watching its user. Specifically, we tested the effect of robotic behaviours that are synchronised with the actions of a human. We evaluated the effects of these behaviours on the robot’s likeability and perceived intelligence using an online video survey. The robot used was Care-O-bot®3, a non-anthropomorphic robot with a limited range of expressive motions. We found that even minimal, positively synchronised movements during an object-oriented task were interpreted by participants as engagement and created a positive disposition towards the robot. However, even negatively synchronised movements of the robot led to more positive perceptions of the robot, as compared to a robot that does not move at all. The results emphasise a) the powerful role that robot movements in general can have on participants’ perception of the robot, and b) that synchronisation of body movements can be a powerful means to enhance the positive attitude towards a non-anthropomorphic robot.Peer reviewe

The Frankenstein syndrome questionnaire: : Results from a quantitative cross-cultural survey

Dag Sverre Syrdal, Tatsuya Nomura, and Kerstin Dautenhahn, 'The Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire – Results from a Quantitative Cross-Cultural Survey', In: Herrmann G., Pearson M.J., Lenz A., Bremner P., Spiers A., Leonards U. (eds) Social Robotics. ICSR 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8239. Springer, Cham. Paper presented at the International Conference on Social Robotics, (ICSR) 2013, Bristol, UK, 27-29 October 2013. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013This paper describes the results from a cross-cultural survey of attitudes towards humanoid robots conducted in Japan and with a Western sampe. The survey used the tentatively titled "Frankenstein Syndrome Questionnaire" and combined responses both from a Japanese and Western sample in order to explore common, cross-cultural factor structures in these responses. In addition, the differences between samples in terms of relationships between factors as well as other intra-sample relationships were examined. Findings suggest that the Western sample's interfactor relationships were more structured than the Japanese sample, and that intra-sample characteristics such as age and gender were more prevalent in the Western sample than the Japanese sample. The results are discussed in relation to the notion of the Frankenstein Syndrome advanced by Kaplan [1]

Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children : What do potential users think?

Luke Wood, Hagen Lehmann, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Ben Robins, Austen Rayner, and Dag Syrdal, ‘Robot-Mediated Interviews with Children: What do potential users think?’, paper presented at the 50th Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and the Simulation of Behaviour, 1 April 2014 – 4 April 2014, London, UK.When police officers are conducting interviews with children, some of the disclosures can be quite shocking. This can make it difficult for an officer to maintain their composure without subtly indicating their shock to the child, which can in turn impede the information acquisition process. Using a robotic interviewer could eliminate this problem as the behaviours and expressions of the robot can be consciously controlled. To date research investigating the potential of Robot-Mediated Interviews has focused on establishing whether children will respond to robots in an interview scenario and if so how well. The results of these studies indicate that children will talk to a robot in an interview scenario in a similar way to which they talk to a human interviewer. However, in order to test if this approach would work in a real world setting, it is important to establish what the experts (e.g. specialist child interviewers) would require from the system. To determine the needs of the users we conducted a user panel with a group of potential real world users to gather their views of our current system and find out what they would require for the system to be useful to them. The user group we worked with consisted of specialist child protection police officers based in the UK. The findings from this panel suggest that a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system would need to be more flexible than our current system in order to respond to unpredictable situations and paths of investigation. This paper gives an insight into what real world users would need from a Robot-Mediated Interviewing system