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With robots becoming more prevalent in daily life, it is important to understand human attitudes toward robots not only when humans interact with them directly, as most research examines, but also when people are indirectly exposed to robots performing nonsocial tasks (e.g., cleaning) in their vicinity. Because minimalistic robots are at present more likely to be found in households than human-like...
Negative attitudes towards robots are common and pose an obstacle for successful and pleasant human-robot interaction. To reduce negative attitudes in the context of social robotics, we draw upon social psychological methods of attitude change. Imagined contact represents one such paradigm which to date has mostly been tested and validated in the human-human intergroup context. In the present experiment,...
The feedback of a robot is a powerful means to establish smooth human-robot interaction (HRI). We report on a user study to assess the applicability of a screen in a human-robot game-playing scenario. The screen was deployed to compensate for expressive shortcomings of a social robot due to its mechanical limitations of non-movable facial features. The participants played Rock-Paper-Scissors with...
Robots that engage in social behaviors benefit greatly from possessing tools that allow them to manipulate the course of an interaction. Using a non-anthropomorphic social robot and a simple counting game, we examine the effects that empathy-generating robot dialogue has on participant performance across three conditions. In the self-directed condition, the robot petitions the participant to reduce...
In this paper we present results from a user evaluation of a robot bartender system which handles state uncertainty derived from speech input by using belief tracking and generating appropriate clarification questions. We present a combination of state estimation and action selection components in which state uncertainty is tracked and exploited, and compare it to a baseline version that uses standard...
Urban Search And Rescue (USAR) robots are used to find and save victims in the wake of disasters such as earthquakes or terrorist attacks. The operators of these robots are affected by high cognitive load; this hinders effective robot usage. This paper presents a cognitive task load model for real-time monitoring and, subsequently, balancing of workload on three factors that affect operator performance...
The Uncanny Valley Hypothesis (UVH) describes the sudden change in a person's affect from affinity to aversion that is evoked by robots that border a human-like appearance. The portion of the human-likeness spectrum in which such aversion is posited to occur is referred to as the “uncanny valley”. However, evidence in support of the UVH is primarily based on subjectively assessed evaluations. Thus...
Good communication is critical to seamless human-robot interaction. Among numerous communication channels, here we focus on gestures, and in particular on spacial deixis: pointing at objects in the environment in order to reference them. We propose a mathematical model that enables robots to generate pointing configurations that make the goal object as clear as possible — pointing configurations that...
With a view to studying the development of social relationships between humans and robots, it is our contention that music can help provide extended engagement and open ended interaction. In this paper we explore the effectiveness of music as a mode of engagement using Mortimer, a robot able to play a drum kit and employing a composition algorithm to respond to a human pianist. We used this system...
Recent studies on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have reported that positive emotions can be a good incentive for children with ASD to perform spontaneous positive social behaviors. Based on this findings, we propose an affective robot-assisted activity (ARAA) for fostering social interaction and communication skills among children with ASD by promoting their positive emotional responses through...
Meetings are an integral part of the work place and society in general. Research in Computer Supported Cooperative Work attempts to facilitate and make the process of meetings more effective. Our vision is that the incorporation of social robots in such human-human collaborative settings can assist and improve the effectiveness of a meeting. In this paper we present an empirical study in which pairs...
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