The impact of peoples' personal dispositions and personalities on their trust of robots in an emergency scenario

Humans should be able to trust that they can safely interact with their home companion robot. However, robots can exhibit occasional mechanical, programming or functional errors. We hypothesise that the severity of the consequences and the timing of a robot's different types of erroneous behaviours during an interaction may have different impacts on users' attitudes towards a domestic robot. First, we investigated human users' perceptions of the severity of various categories of potential errors that are likely to be exhibited by a domestic robot. Second, we used an interactive storyboard to evaluate participants' degree of trust in the robot after it performed tasks either correctly, or with 'small' or 'big' errors. Finally, we analysed the correlation between participants' responses regarding their personality, predisposition to trust other humans, their perceptions of robots, and their interaction with the robot. We conclude that there is correlation between the magnitude of an error performed by a robot and the corresponding loss of trust by the human towards the robot. Moreover we observed that some traits of participants' personalities (conscientiousness and agreeableness) and their disposition of trusting other humans (benevolence) significantly increased their tendency to trust a robot more during an emergency scenario.Peer reviewe

Application of support vector machines in detecting hand grasp gestures using a commercially off the shelf wireless myoelectric armband

©2017 IEEE.The propose of this study was to assess the feasibility of using support vector machines in analysing myoelectric signals acquired using an off the shelf device, the Myo armband from Thalmic Lab, when performing hand grasp gestures. Participants (n = 26) took part in the study wearing the armband and producing a series of required gestures. Support vector machines were used to train a model using participant training values, and to classify gestures produced by the same participants. Different Kernel functions and electrode combinations were studied. Also we contrasted different lengths of training values versus different lengths for the classification samples. The overall accuracy was 94.9% with data from 8 electrodes, and 72% where only four of the electrodes were used. The linear kernel outperformed the polynomial, and radial basis function. Exploring the number of training samples versus the achieved classification accuracy, results identified acceptable accuracies (> 90%) for training around 2.5s, and recognising grasp with 0.2s of acquired data. The best recognised grasp was the hand closed (97.6%), followed by cylindrical grasp (96.8%), the lateral grasp (93.2%) and tripod (92%). These results allows us to progress to the next stage of work where the Myo armband is used in the context of robot-mediated stroke rehabilitation and also involves more dynamic interactions as well as gross upper arm movements.Final Published versio

Does the Appearance of a Robot Influence People's Perception of Task Criticality?

© 2018 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.As home robot companions become more common, it is important to understand what types of tasks are considered critical to perform correctly. This paper provides working definitions of task criticality, physical and cognitive tasks with respect to robot task performance. Our research also suggests that although people's perceptions of task criticality is independent of robot appearances, their expectation that a robot performs tasks correctly is affected by it's appearance

Summary of STOL ground vortex investigation

An experimental facility was developed in the 1.23 (48 inch) wind tunnel of the Applied Research Lab. at the Pennsylvania State Univ. to model the ground vortex. The purpose of the facility was to study the effect of various parameters on the location and characteristics of a ground vortex. An experimental investigation was conducted in the tunnel into the formation, stability and strength of the ground vortex for several flow parameters. The design of the facility, special instrumentation and results are summarized

Policy Recommendations for Meeting the Grand Challenge to Close the Health Gap

This brief was created forSocial Innovation for America’s Renewal, a policy conference organized by the Center for Social Development in collaboration with the American Academy of Social Work & Social Welfare, which is leading theGrand Challenges for Social Work initiative to champion social progress. The conference site includes links to speeches, presentations, and a full list of the policy briefs

Designing Experiments for Children and Robots

The way in which a robot is presented to children can have a profound effect on their perception of its capabilities. A Poppy Humanoid robot was introduced to 43 children (aged 7-9) either as a robot that needed programming or as a member of the team which needed to learn. The children were asked to write down three actions they believed that the robot could complete. Thematic analysis was then used to categorise the data. When the robot was not humanised, 71% of the suggestions were about completing a physical action or sequence of actions and 14% required the robot to exhibit intelligence or learning. When humanised, 39% of the actions were physical and 35% were categorised as intelligent. Introducing the robot as human captured emotional and appearance actions not otherwise present

Mitral Valve Surgery for Severe Mitral Regurgitation and Dilated Cardiomyopathy—A Bridge to Transplant: Case Report and a Review of Literature

We report a child with myocardial necrosis, dilated cardiomyopathy, and severe mitral valve (MV) regurgitation following neonatal enteroviral myocarditis. He underwent MV annuloplasty at 18 months and MV replacement at 3 years of age. He remains asymptomatic on medical therapy at 8 years of age. Mitral valve surgery may stabilize the evolution of dilated cardiomyopathy and delay the ultimate need for heart transplant.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93665/1/chd626.pd

A matter of consequences: Understanding the effects of robot errors on people's trust in HRI

On reviewing the literature regarding acceptance and trust in human-robot interaction (HRI), there are a number of open questions that needed to be addressed in order to establish effective collaborations between humans and robots in real-world applications. In particular, we identified four principal open areas that should be investigated to create guidelines for the successful deployment of robots in the wild. These areas are focused on: 1) the robot's abilities and limitations; in particular when it makes errors with different severity of consequences, 2) individual differences, 3) the dynamics of human-robot trust, and 4) the interaction between humans and robots over time. In this paper, we present two very similar studies, one with a virtual robot with human-like abilities, and one with a Care-O-bot 4 robot. In the first study, we create an immersive narrative using an interactive storyboard to collect responses of 154 participants. In the second study, 6 participants had repeated interactions over three weeks with a physical robot. We summarise and discuss the findings of our investigations of the effects of robots' errors on people's trust in robots for designing mechanisms that allow robots to recover from a breach of trust. In particular, we observed that robots' errors had greater impact on people's trust in the robot when the errors were made at the beginning of the interaction and had severe consequences. Our results also provided insights on how these errors vary according to the individuals’ personalities, expectations and previous experiences

Predictors of Left Ventricular Remodeling after Aortic Valve Replacement in Pediatric Patients with Isolated Aortic Regurgitation

Objective. To identify the risk factors that could predict postoperative outcome after aortic valve replacement in pediatric patients with isolated aortic regurgitation ( AR ). Background. There is controversy regarding the appropriate timing of surgery in asymptomatic or minimally symptomatic patients with isolated AR . In the pediatric age group, there are limited studies in this regard and most of them are on combined aortic valve stenosis and regurgitation. Methods. All patients with biventricular physiology and morphologic left ventricle ( LV ) who underwent aortic valve surgery for AR from J anuary 1988 to J uly 2010 were included in the study. Demographic, clinical, and echocardiographic data were collected at presurgical visit, early postoperative, 1 year, and most recent follow‐up. Results. Among 53 patients (36 males), 18 had LV end‐diastolic diameter ( LVEDD ) z ‐score >4 standard deviation ( SD ) (group I ) and 35 had LVEDD 4 SD predicted persistent LV dilation (>2 SD ) at early post‐op ( P  4 SD ) are significant predictors of incomplete LV remodeling or persistent LV dysfunction.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97538/1/chd703.pd