scholarly journals Accessibility Guidelines for Tactile Displays in Human-Robot Interaction. A Comparative Study and Proposal

2018 ◽  
pp. 217-220
Author(s):  
Malak Qbilat ◽  
Ana Iglesias
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Tactile Displays ◽  
Accessibility Guidelines

scholarly journals A Proposal of Accessibility Guidelines for Human-Robot Interaction

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 561
Author(s):  
Malak Qbilat ◽  
Ana Iglesias ◽  
Tony Belpaeme
Keyword(s):  
Social Impact ◽  
Social Acceptance ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Design Practice ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Accessibility Barriers ◽  
Accessibility Guidelines ◽  
Different Characteristics

We will increasingly become dependent on automation to support our manufacturing and daily living, and robots are likely to take an important place in this. Unfortunately, currently not all the robots are accessible for all users. This is due to the different characteristics of users, as users with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disabilities were not considered during the design, implementation or interaction phase, causing accessibility barriers to users who have limitations. This research presents a proposal for accessibility guidelines for human-robot interaction (HRI). The guidelines have been evaluated by seventeen HRI designers and/or developers. A questionnaire of nine five-point Likert Scale questions and 6 open-ended questions was developed to evaluate the proposed guidelines for developers and designers, in terms of four main factors: usability, social acceptance, user experience and social impact. The questions act as indicators for each factor. The majority (15 of 17 participants) agreed that the guidelines are helpful for them to design and implement accessible robot interfaces and applications. Some of them had considered some ad hoc guidelines in their design practice, but none of them showed awareness of or had applied all the proposed guidelines in their design practice, 72% of the proposed guidelines have been applied by less than or equal to 8 participants for each guideline. Moreover, 16 of 17 participants would use the proposed guidelines in their future robot designs or evaluation. The participants recommended the importance of aligning the proposed guidelines with safety requirements, environment of interaction (indoor or outdoor), cost and users’ expectations.

scholarly journals Four-Features Evaluation of Text to Speech Systems for Three Social Robots

Electronics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 267
Author(s):  
Fernando Alonso Martin ◽  
María Malfaz ◽  
Álvaro Castro-González ◽  
José Carlos Castillo ◽  
Miguel Ángel Salichs
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Social Robotics ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Human Robot Interaction ◽  
Text To Speech ◽  
Robot Interaction ◽  
Speech Synthesizer ◽  
Human Voice ◽  
Research Questions

The success of social robotics is directly linked to their ability of interacting with people. Humans possess verbal and non-verbal communication skills, and, therefore, both are essential for social robots to get a natural human–robot interaction. This work focuses on the first of them since the majority of social robots implement an interaction system endowed with verbal capacities. In order to do this implementation, we must equip social robots with an artificial voice system. In robotics, a Text to Speech (TTS) system is the most common speech synthesizer technique. The performance of a speech synthesizer is mainly evaluated by its similarity to the human voice in relation to its intelligibility and expressiveness. In this paper, we present a comparative study of eight off-the-shelf TTS systems used in social robots. In order to carry out the study, 125 participants evaluated the performance of the following TTS systems: Google, Microsoft, Ivona, Loquendo, Espeak, Pico, AT&T, and Nuance. The evaluation was performed after observing videos where a social robot communicates verbally using one TTS system. The participants completed a questionnaire to rate each TTS system in relation to four features: intelligibility, expressiveness, artificiality, and suitability. In this study, four research questions were posed to determine whether it is possible to present a ranking of TTS systems in relation to each evaluated feature, or, on the contrary, there are no significant differences between them. Our study shows that participants found differences between the TTS systems evaluated in terms of intelligibility, expressiveness, and artificiality. The experiments also indicated that there was a relationship between the physical appearance of the robots (embodiment) and the suitability of TTS systems.

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