| 1. |
- Akalin, Neziha, 1988-, et al.
(författare)
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A Taxonomy of Factors Influencing Perceived Safety in Human–Robot Interaction
- 2023
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer Science and Business Media B.V.. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Safety is a fundamental prerequisite that must be addressed before any interaction of robots with humans. Safety has been generally understood and studied as the physical safety of robots in human–robot interaction, whereas how humans perceive these robots has received less attention. Physical safety is a necessary condition for safe human–robot interaction. However, it is not a sufficient condition. A robot that is safe by hardware and software design can still be perceived as unsafe. This article focuses on perceived safety in human–robot interaction. We identified six factors that are closely related to perceived safety based on the literature and the insights obtained from our user studies. The identified factors are the context of robot use, comfort, experience and familiarity with robots, trust, the sense of control over the interaction, and transparent and predictable robot actions. We then made a literature review to identify the robot-related factors that influence perceived safety. Based the literature, we propose a taxonomy which includes human-related and robot-related factors. These factors can help researchers to quantify perceived safety of humans during their interactions with robots. The quantification of perceived safety can yield computational models that would allow mitigating psychological harm.
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| 2. |
- Andreasson, Rebecca, et al.
(författare)
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Affective Touch in Human-Robot Interaction: Conveying Emotion to the Nao Robot
- 2018
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 10:4, s. 473-491
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Affective touch has a fundamental role in human development, social bonding, and for providing emotional support in interpersonal relationships. We present, what is to our knowledge, the first HRI study of tactile conveyance of both positive and negative emotions (affective touch) on the Nao robot, and based on an experimental set-up from a study of human-human tactile communication. In the present work, participants conveyed eight emotions to a small humanoid robot via touch. We found that female participants conveyed emotions for a longer time, using more varied interaction and touching more regions on the robot's body, compared to male participants. Several differences between emotions were found such that emotions could be classified by the valence of the emotion conveyed, by combining touch amount and duration. Overall, these results show high agreement with those reported for human-human affective tactile communication and could also have impact on the design and placement of tactile sensors on humanoid robots.
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| 3. |
- Bonaccorsi, Manuele, et al.
(författare)
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A cloud robotics solution to improve social assistive robots for active and healthy aging
- 2016
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 8:3, s. 393-408
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Technological innovation in robotics and ICT represents an effective solution to tackle the challenge of providing social sustainable care services for the ageing population. The recent introduction of cloud technologies is opening new opportunities for the provisioning of advanced robotic services based on the cooperation of a number of connected robots, smart environments and devices improved by the huge cloud computational and storage capability. In this context, this paper aims to investigate and assess the potentialities of a cloud robotic system for the provisioning of assistive services for the promotion of active and healthy ageing. The system comprised two different smart environments, located in Italy and Sweden, where a service robot is connected to a cloud platform for the provisioning of localization based services to the users. The cloud robotic services were tested in the two realistic environments to assess the general feasibility of the solution and demonstrate the ability to provide assistive location based services in a multiple environment framework. The results confirmed the validity of the solution but also suggested a deeper investigation on the dependability of the communication technologies adopted in such kind of systems.
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| 4. |
- Bruno, Barbara, et al.
(författare)
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Knowledge Representation for Culturally Competent Personal Robots : Requirements, Design Principles, Implementation, and Assessment
- 2019
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 11:3, s. 515-538
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Culture, intended as the set of beliefs, values, ideas, language, norms and customs which compose a person's life, is an essential element to know by any robot for personal assistance. Culture, intended as that person's background, can be an invaluable source of information to drive and speed up the process of discovering and adapting to the person's habits, preferences and needs. This article discusses the requirements posed by cultural competence on the knowledge management system of a robot. We propose a framework for cultural knowledge representation that relies on (i) a three-layer ontology for storing concepts of relevance, culture-specific information and statistics, person-specific information and preferences; (ii) an algorithm for the acquisition of person-specific knowledge, which uses culture-specific knowledge to drive the search; (iii) a Bayesian Network for speeding up the adaptation to the person by propagating the effects of acquiring one specific information onto interconnected concepts. We have conducted a preliminary evaluation of the framework involving 159 Italian and German volunteers and considering 122 among habits, attitudes and social norms.
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| 5. |
- Cappuccio, Massimiliano L., et al.
(författare)
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Can Robots Make us Better Humans? Virtuous Robotics and the Good Life with Artificial Agents
- 2021
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1875-4805 .- 1875-4791. ; 133:1, s. 7-22
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This position paper proposes a novel approach to the ethical design of social robots. We coin the term "Virtuous Robotics" to describe Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) designed to help humans reach a higher level of moral development. Our approach contrasts with mainstream approaches to robot design inspired by the other normative theories, Consequentialism and Deontology. In the paper we theoretically justify our proposal, illustrating how the Virtuous Robotics approach allows us to discriminate between positive and negative applications of robotics systems, of which we provide examples. From an ethical perspective, our proposal is theoretically robust because it is based on the assistive role played by the robot rather than the robot's moral agency. From a designer's perspective, Virtuous Robotics is technically feasible because it transfers the cognitive burden of HRI from the robot to the user, bypassing the need for complex decision-making abilities. From the user's perspective, it is concretely advantageous, because it envisions a realistic way to make robots morally desirable in our lives, as supports for personal betterment and fulfilment.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Cooney, Martin, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Avoiding Playfulness Gone Wrong: Exploring Multi-objective Reaching Motion Generation in a Social Robot
- 2017
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - Dordrecht : Springer Netherlands. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 9:4, s. 545-562
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Companion robots will be able to perform useful tasks in homes and public places, while also providing entertainment through playful interactions. “Playful” here means fun, happy, and humorous. A challenge is that generating playful motions requires a non-trivial understanding of how people attribute meaning and intentions. The literature suggests that playfulness can lead to some undesired impressions such as that a robot is obnoxious, untrustworthy, unsafe, moving in a meaningless fashion, or boring. To generate playfulness while avoiding such typical failures, we proposed a model for the scenario of a robot arm reaching for an object: some simplified movement patterns such as sinusoids are structured toward appearing helpful, clear about goals, safe, and combining a degree of structure and anomaly. We integrated our model into a mathematical framework (CHOMP) and built a new robot, Kakapo, to perform dynamically generated motions. The results of an exploratory user experiment were positive, suggesting that: Our proposed system was perceived as playful over the course of several minutes. Also a better impression resulted compared with an alternative playful system which did not use our proposed heuristics; furthermore a negative effect was observed for several minutes after showing the alternative motions, suggesting that failures are important to avoid. And, an inverted u-shaped correlation was observed between motion length and degree of perceived playfulness, suggesting that motions should neither be too short or too long and that length is also a factor which can be considered when generating playful motions. A short follow-up study provided some additional support for the idea that playful motions which seek to avoid failures can be perceived positively. Our intent is that these exploratory results will provide some insight for designing various playful robot motions, toward achieving some good interactions. © 2017, The Author(s).
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| 8. |
- Cooney, Martin, 1980-, et al.
(författare)
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Designing Enjoyable Motion-Based Play Interactions with a Small Humanoid Robot
- 2014
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - Dordrecht : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 6:2, s. 173-193
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Robots designed to co-exist with humans in domestic and public environments should be capable of interacting with people in an enjoyable fashion in order to be socially accepted. In this research, we seek to set up a small humanoid robot with the capability to provide enjoyment to people who pick up the robot and play with it by hugging, shaking and moving the robot in various ways. Inertial sensors inside a robot can capture how its body is moved when people perform such "full-body gestures". Unclear is how a robot can recognize what people do during play, and how such knowledge can be used to provide enjoyment. People's behavior is complex, and naive designs for a robot's behavior based only on intuitive knowledge from previous designs may lead to failed interactions. To solve these problems, we model people's behavior using typical full-body gestures observed in free interaction trials, and devise an interaction design based on avoiding typical failures observed in play sessions with a naive version of our robot. The interaction design is completed by investigating how a robot can provide "reward" and itself suggest ways to play during an interaction. We then verify experimentally that our design can be used to provide enjoyment during a playful interaction. By describing the process of how a small humanoid robot can be designed to provide enjoyment, we seek to move one step closer to realizing companion robots which can be successfully integrated into human society.
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| 9. |
- Engwall, Olov, et al.
(författare)
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Is a Wizard-of-Oz Required for Robot-Led Conversation Practice in a Second Language?
- 2022
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer Nature. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805.
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The large majority of previous work on human-robot conversations in a second language has been performed with a human wizard-of-Oz. The reasons are that automatic speech recognition of non-native conversational speech is considered to be unreliable and that the dialogue management task of selecting robot utterances that are adequate at a given turn is complex in social conversations. This study therefore investigates if robot-led conversation practice in a second language with pairs of adult learners could potentially be managed by an autonomous robot. We first investigate how correct and understandable transcriptions of second language learner utterances are when made by a state-of-the-art speech recogniser. We find both a relatively high word error rate (41%) and that a substantial share (42%) of the utterances are judged to be incomprehensible or only partially understandable by a human reader. We then evaluate how adequate the robot utterance selection is, when performed manually based on the speech recognition transcriptions or autonomously using (a) predefined sequences of robot utterances, (b) a general state-of-the-art language model that selects utterances based on learner input or the preceding robot utterance, or (c) a custom-made statistical method that is trained on observations of the wizard’s choices in previous conversations. It is shown that adequate or at least acceptable robot utterances are selected by the human wizard in most cases (96%), even though the ASR transcriptions have a high word error rate. Further, the custom-made statistical method performs as well as manual selection of robot utterances based on ASR transcriptions. It was also found that the interaction strategy that the robot employed, which differed regarding how much the robot maintained the initiative in the conversation and if the focus of the conversation was on the robot or the learners, had marginal effects on the word error rate and understandability of the transcriptions but larger effects on the adequateness of the utterance selection. Autonomous robot-led conversations may hence work better with some robot interaction strategies.
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| 10. |
- Engwall, Olov, et al.
(författare)
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Robot Interaction Styles for Conversation Practice in Second Language Learning
- 2021
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Ingår i: International Journal of Social Robotics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1875-4791 .- 1875-4805. ; 13, s. 251-276
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Four different interaction styles for the social robot Furhat acting as a host in spoken conversation practice with two simultaneous language learners have been developed, based on interaction styles of human moderators of language cafés. We first investigated, through a survey and recorded sessions of three-party language café style conversations, how the interaction styles of human moderators are influenced by different factors (e.g., the participants language level and familiarity). Using this knowledge, four distinct interaction styles were developed for the robot: sequentially asking one participant questions at the time (Interviewer); the robot speaking about itself, robots and Sweden or asking quiz questions about Sweden (Narrator); attempting to make the participants talk with each other (Facilitator); and trying to establish a three-party robot–learner– learner interaction with equal participation (Interlocutor). A user study with 32 participants, conversing in pairs with the robot, was carried out to investigate how the post-session ratings of the robot’s behavior along different dimensions (e.g., the robot’s conversational skills and friendliness, the value of practice) are influenced by the robot’s interaction style and participant variables (e.g., level in the target language, gender, origin). The general findings were that Interviewer received the highest mean rating, but that different factors influenced the ratings substantially, indicating that the preference of individual participants needs to be anticipated in order to improve learner satisfaction with the practice. We conclude with a list of recommendations for robot-hosted conversation practice in a second language.
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