Movement Acts in Breakdown Situations : How a Robot’s Recovery Procedure Affects Participants’ Opinions

Funding Information: Funding information : This research was partly funded by the Research Council of Norway as part of the Multimodal Elderly Care Systems (MECS) project, under grant agreement 247697. Publisher Copyright: © 2021 Trenton Schulz et al., published by De Gruyter.Recovery procedures are targeted at correcting issues encountered by robots. What are people’s opinions of a robot during these recovery procedures? During an experiment that examined how a mobile robot moved, the robot would unexpectedly pause or rotate itself to recover from a navigation problem. The serendipity of the recovery procedure and people’s understanding of it became a case study to examine how future study designs could consider breakdowns better and look at suggestions for better robot behaviors in such situations. We present the original experiment with the recovery procedure. We then examine the responses from the participants in this experiment qualitatively to see how they interpreted the breakdown situation when it occurred. Responses could be grouped into themes of sentience, competence, and the robot’s forms. The themes indicate that the robot’s movement communicated different information to different participants. This leads us to introduce the concept of movement acts to help examine the explicit and implicit parts of communication in movement. Given that we developed the concept looking at an unexpected breakdown, we suggest that researchers should plan for the possibility of breakdowns in experiments and examine and report people’s experience around a robot breakdown to further explore unintended robot communication.Peer reviewe

Communicative Robot Signals: Presenting a New Typology for Human-Robot Interaction

© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/We present a new typology for classifying signals from robots when they communicate with humans. For inspiration, we use ethology, the study of animal behaviour and previous efforts from literature as guides in defining the typology. The typology is based on communicative signals that consist of five properties: the origin where the signal comes from, the deliberateness of the signal, the signal's reference, the genuineness of the signal, and its clarity (i.e. how implicit or explicit it is). Using the accompanying worksheet, the typology is straightforward to use to examine communicative signals from previous human-robot interactions and provides guidance for designers to use the typology when designing new robot behaviours

Strengthening Human Autonomy. In the era of autonomous technology

‘Autonomous technologies’ refers to systems that make decisions without explicit human control or interaction. This conceptual paper explores the notion of autonomy by first exploring human autonomy, and then using this understanding to analyze how autonomous technology could or should be modelled. First, we discuss what human autonomy means. We conclude that it is the overall space for action—rather than the degree of control—and the actual choices, or number of choices, that constitutes human autonomy. Based on this, our second discussion leads us to suggest the term datanomous to denote technology that builds on, and is restricted by, its own data when operating autonomously. Our conceptual exploration brings forth a more precise definition of human autonomy and datanomous systems. Finally, we conclude this exploration by suggesting that human autonomy can be strengthened by datanomous technologies, but only if they support the human space for action. It is the purpose of human activity that determines if technology strengthens or weakens human autonomy

Creating vision-independent representations using a phenomenological approach to tangible and embodied interaction

For synshemmede individer er mesteparten av visuell informasjon utilgjengelig, da disse ikke har mulighet til å hente den ut direkte med sitt begrensede sanseapparat. Mennesker er avhengige av synet sitt for å kunne danne seg en oversikt av omgivelsene fra avstand, og dermed vil totalt fravær av syn eller mangler i synsfeltet føre til større vanskeligheter i utførelsen av aktiviteter der synet er nødvendig for å kunne lese omgivelsene for å kunne utføre en handling. Derfor har jeg i denne oppgaven tatt for meg problematikken rundt å skape meningsfulle representasjoner som er uavhengige av synet for å bli oppfattet. For å kunne gjøre dette, har jeg ved å bruke en økologisk synsvinkel til persepsjon, og en fenomenologisk tilnærming til embodiment, sett på representasjoners karakter for å forstå hvordan disse kan ha mening for en observatør. To konseptuelle forslag for design blir lagt frem på bakgrunn av intervjuer, deltagende observasjon, og nettdiskusjoner med synshemmede individer, samt gjennom teoretiske undersøkelser og diskusjoner. I begge forslagene vil den synshemmede brukeren være i stand til å hente ut informasjon fra omgivelsene opprinnelig skjult for deres sanseapparat

Facilitating Robots at Home: A Framework for Understanding Robot Facilitation

One of the primary characteristics of robots is the ability to move autonomously in the same space as humans. In what ways does movement influence the interaction between humans and robot? In this paper, we examine how work is changed by the deployment of service robots. Through a multiple case study, the phenomenon is investigated, both in an industrial and domestic context. Through analyzing our data, we propose a framework for understanding the change of tasks named the Robot Facilitation Framework. © 2018 IARI

Strengthening human autonomy in the era of autonomous technology - Contemporary perspectives on interaction with 'autonomous things'

The aim of this workshop is to address the role that human autonomy presently receives in HCI research and how “autonomous technologies” might challenge, rather than facilitate human autonomy. We acknowledge a need for new ways of understanding HCI and interaction design as digital technologies develop in the “4th wave”. In this workshop, participants are invited to a discussion where the autonomous human-being—who can act autonomously with autonomous technologies—is emphasized, beyond simple human control to a more flexible, sophisticated, subtle, and sustainable autonomy