The Contribution of Society to the Construction of Individual Intelligence

It is argued that society is a crucial factor in the construction of individual intelligence. In other words that it is important that intelligence is socially situated in an analogous way to the physical situation of robots. Evidence that this may be the case is taken from developmental linguistics, the social intelligence hypothesis, the complexity of society, the need for self-reflection and autism. The consequences for the development of artificial social agents is briefly considered. Finally some challenges for research into socially situated intelligence are highlighted

Bluetooth low energy for autonomous human-robot interaction

© 2017 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).This demonstration shows how inexpensive, off-the-shelf, and unobtrusive Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) devices can be utilized for enabling robots to recognize touch gestures, to perceive proximity information, and to distinguish between interacting individuals autonomously. The received signal strength (RSS) between the BLE device attached to the robot and BLE devices attached to the interacting individuals is used to achieve this. Almost no software configuration is needed and the setup can be applied to most everyday environments and robot platforms

Motor Resonance as Indicator for Quality of Interaction - Does it Scale to Natural Movements?

This paper is the output of work that is financed by a grant by the Air Force Office for Scientific Research (AFOSR). © 2018 International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (www.ifaamas.org). All rights reserved.Detecting in an automatic manner whether a particular interaction between man and machine “works”, is an unsolved problem in human-machine interaction. No computational technique exists by which the artificial agent could perceive whether the interaction works from the viewpoint of the human or whether interactional breakdown is likely to occur. In human-robot interaction motor resonance has been proposed as a potential candidate for assessing what might be termed “quality of interaction”. Other authors have asserted that “the measure of resonance indicates the extent to which an artificial agent is considered as a social inter-actor” and call it “a plausible foundation for higher-order social cognition”. Motor interference is often used as a metric for resonance. While the above suggests that motor resonance might be suitable as general measure for the potential of an artificial agent to be conceived of as a social entity, the question remains whether it can be used as a measure for the quality of an ongoing interaction

Development of a Semi-Autonomous Robotic System to Assist Children with Autism in Developing Visual Perspective Taking Skills

Robot-assisted therapy has been successfully used to help children with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) develop their social skills, but very often with the robot being fully controlled remotely by an adult operator. Although this method is reliable and allows the operator to conduct a therapy session in a customised child-centred manner, it increases the cognitive workload on the human operator since it requires them to divide their attention between the robot and the child to ensure that the robot is responding appropriately to the child's behaviour. In addition, a remote-controlled robot is not aware of the information regarding the interaction with children (e.g., body gesture and head pose, proximity etc) and consequently it does not have the ability to shape live HRIs. Further to this, a remote-controlled robot typically does not have the capacity to record this information and additional effort is required to analyse the interaction data. For these reasons, using a remote-controlled robot in robot-assisted therapy may be unsustainable for long-term interactions. To lighten the cognitive burden on the human operator and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience, it is essential to create some degrees of autonomy and enable the robot to perform some autonomous behaviours during interactions with children. Our previous research with the Kaspar robot either implemented a fully autonomous scenario involving pairs of children, which then lacked the often important input of the supervising adult, or, in most of our research, has used a remote control in the hand of the adult or the children to operate the robot. Alternatively, this paper provides an overview of the design and implementation of a robotic system called Sense- Think-Act which converts the remote-controlled scenarios of our humanoid robot into a semi-autonomous social agent with the capacity to play games autonomously (under human supervision) with children in the real-world school settings. The developed system has been implemented on the humanoid robot Kaspar and evaluated in a trial with four children with ASC at a local specialist secondary school in the UK where the data of 11 Child-Robot Interactions (CRIs) was collected. The results from this trial demonstrated that the system was successful in providing the robot with appropriate control signals to operate in a semi-autonomous manner without any latency, which supports autonomous CRIs, suggesting that the proposed architecture appears to have promising potential in supporting CRIs for real-world applications.Peer reviewe

Robot-assisted therapy for upper limb impairments in cerebral palsy:A scoping review and suggestions for future research

A growing number of studies investigate the use of robotics therapy for motor (re)habilitation with children with cerebral palsy (CP). Most of these studies use functional robots in very repetitive sessions. While the therapy is effective, very few studies employ social robots, which appears to be a missed opportunity to design more compelling and enjoyable sessions for the children. In this article, we will review robot-assisted upper limb motor (re)habilitation for children with CP. Previous reviews of robot-assisted therapy for CP had mostly focused on lower limbs, or the review was made from a medical point of view, with the sole concern being the therapy's effectiveness. Here, we focus our review on robot-assisted upper limb (re)habilitation and address human-robot interaction considerations. We searched PubMed, Scopus, and IEEE databases and argue that although this area of research is promising and already effective, it would benefit from the inclusion of social robots for a more engaging and enjoyable experience. We suggest four scenarios that could be developed in this direction. The goal of this article is to highlight the relevance of the past work and encourage the development of new ideas where therapy will socially engage and motivate children.</p

A Narrative Approach to Human-Robot Interaction Prototyping for Companion Robots

© 2020 Kheng Lee Koay et al., published by De Gruyter This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This paper presents a proof of concept prototype study for domestic home robot companions, using a narrative-based methodology based on the principles of immersive engagement and fictional enquiry, creating scenarios which are inter-connected through a coherent narrative arc, to encourage participant immersion within a realistic setting. The aim was to ground human interactions with this technology in a coherent, meaningful experience. Nine participants interacted with a robotic agent in a smart home environment twice a week over a month, with each interaction framed within a greater narrative arc. Participant responses, both to the scenarios and the robotic agents used within them are discussed, suggesting that the prototyping methodology was successful in conveying a meaningful interaction experience.Peer reviewe

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