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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...
The objective of this study is to examine the effect of the robot types on emotional engagement with robots. Robots are classified into an autonomous robot and a tele-operated robot according to the levels of autonomy. On the contrary, robots could be distinguished depending on the levels of human intervention required for controlling a robot. An autonomous robot performs task by itself while a tele-operated...
We performed an experimental study (n=48) of the effects of context congruency on human perceptions of robotic facial expressions across cultures (Western and East Asian individuals). We found that context congruency had a significant effect on human perceptions, and that this effect varied by the emotional valence of the context and facial expression. Moreover, these effects occurred regardless of...
Service robots employed in public spaces need to be equipped with specific sensing, reasoning and human-robot interaction capabilities to adapt their interaction style and thus effectively engage with a variety of users. In this paper we present a method used by an ubiquitous robotic system to gather 3D body metrics and use them to robustly estimate age and gender of previously unseen participants...
Pointing is a typical means of directing a human's attention to a specific object or event. Robot pointing behaviours that direct the attention of humans are critical for human-robot interaction, communication and collaboration. In this paper, we describe an experiment undertaken to investigate human comprehension of a humanoid robot's pointing behaviour. We programmed a NAO robot to point to markers...
This paper describes in detail the robot platform used in a rehabilitation program for children with Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) under a project to compare a rehabilitation program through robotics (1) with a conventional rehabilitation program directed to parents (2) and a control group where no specific intervention is done (3). As LEGO ® has been demonstrated as a useful robotic tool able to enhance...
In this paper, we propose a novel way to encourage visitors to share their experiences and interests in exhibition spaces. To acquire information about the experiences of the visitors, we used a robot that inhabits the exhibition space. The robot acquires the visitor experience data and then shares this data with other visitors. We believe that this information (i.e., the experiences of previous visitors)...
Humanoid robots have this formidable advantage to possess a body quite similar in shape to humans. This body grants them, obviously, locomotion but also a medium to express emotions without even needing a face. In this paper we propose to study the effects of emotional gaits from our biped humanoid robot on the subjects' perception of the robot (recognition rate of the emotions, reaction time, anthropomorphism,...
This research explored whether robots can use modern speech synthesizers to convey emotion with their speech. We investigated the use of MARY, an open source speech synthesizer, to convey a robot's emotional intent to novice robot users. The first experiment indicated that participants were able to distinguish the intended emotions of anger, calm, fear, and sadness with success rates of 65.9%, 68...
We studied educational support delivered through a care-receiving robot (CRR) in a children's group activity intended to promote the learning of English words by teaching the robot. Our prior study investigated the feasibility of the CRR for providing educational support in a situation where a child played with the robot by him/herself. Our research uncovered several impactful effects of the CRR for...
This paper describes an extended (6-session) interaction between an ethnically and geographically diverse group of 26 first-grade children and the DragonBot robot in the context of learning about healthy food choices. We find that children demonstrate a high level of enjoyment when interacting with the robot, and a statistically significant increase in engagement with the system over the duration...
This study proposes a gaming companion robot to facilitate social interaction among children. Games have been one popular social communication tool for people, and we propose a novel approach to gaming communication using a robot. We have implemented a robot that is capable of playing a video game to facilitate social interaction in a game environment. We used autonomous control to allow the robot...
We propose a “Value-Dominant Logic” approach to complement HRI research by integrating two well-known user-centric methodologies from the field of marketing. From the results of laddering interviews accompanied by a visual projective technique we show that consumer value perceptions of robots in a retail service environment are of a paradoxical nature where behavioral and social norms are expected...
To construct mind-reading robots, it is important to correctly identify the communicative intention of humans. In human environments, there are usually an enormous number of objects, and each object has many different parts. Therefore, referring to an object or an object part in current communication is not an easy task. We use both linguistic and nonlinguistic information to specify such referential...
There has been some studies in applying robots to education and recent research on socially intelligent robots show robots as partners that collaborate with people. On the other hand, serious games and interaction technologies have also proved to be important pedagogical tools, enhancing collaboration and interest in the learning process. This paper relates to the collaborative scenario in EMOTE EU...
This paper presents a model for developing long-term human-robot interactions and social relationships based on the principle of ‘human’ cognitive biases applied to a robotic platform. The aim of this work is to study how a robot influenced with human ‘misattribution’ can help to build better human-robot interactions than unbiased robots. The results presented in this paper suggest that it is important...
Current human-robot-interaction research methods could benefit from an age-appropriate scale that measures children's attitudes towards robots. This paper presents the design process and evidence for the validity of the Children's Openness to Interacting with a Robot Scale (COIRS). We report findings from a pilot test on a diverse population of 172 U.S. students between the ages of 8–11. High average...
This study contribute toward the creation of social robots as personal and public assistants. The ability of the robot to persuade and motivate people to follow a given behavior is of particular relevance in several cases, especially those related to people's health recover and maintenance (e.g., personal trainer, diet coach, etc.). In this paper, we evaluated the effect of a humanoid robot's use...
A promising technology for teaching robots new skills is learning from demonstrations (LfD) or imitation learning. Even though there is currently large literature in imitation learning, smaller attention was given to studying social aspects of the imitation situation. Back imitation is the situation when the demonstrator (human) imitates the learner (robot) before engaging in the actual teaching....
Being a child with diabetes is challenging: apart from the emotional difficulties of dealing with the disease, there are multiple physical aspects that need to be dealt with on a daily basis. Furthermore, as the children grow older, it becomes necessary to self-manage their condition without the explicit supervision of parents or carers. This process requires that the children overcome a steep learning...
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