scholarly journals The Sounds of Softness. Designing Sound for Human-Soft Robot Interaction

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonas Jørgensen ◽  
Mads Bering Christiansen

In this article, we report on research and creative practice that explores the aesthetic interplay between movement and sound for soft robotics. Our inquiry seeks to interrogate what sound designs might be aesthetically engaging and appropriate for soft robotic movement in a social human-robot interaction setting. We present the design of a soft sound-producing robot, SONŌ, made of pliable and expandable silicone and three sound designs made for this robot. The article comprises an articulation of the underlying design process and results from two empirical interaction experiments (N = 66, N = 60) conducted to evaluate the sound designs. The sound designs did not have statistically significant effects on people’s perception of the social attributes of two different soft robots. Qualitative results, however, indicate that people’s interpretations of the sound designs depend on robot type.

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (130) ◽  
pp. 20170101 ◽  
Author(s):  
M. Calisti ◽  
G. Picardi ◽  
C. Laschi

Soft robotics and its related technologies enable robot abilities in several robotics domains including, but not exclusively related to, manipulation, manufacturing, human–robot interaction and locomotion. Although field applications have emerged for soft manipulation and human–robot interaction, mobile soft robots appear to remain in the research stage, involving the somehow conflictual goals of having a deformable body and exerting forces on the environment to achieve locomotion. This paper aims to provide a reference guide for researchers approaching mobile soft robotics, to describe the underlying principles of soft robot locomotion with its pros and cons, and to envisage applications and further developments for mobile soft robotics.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cinzia Di Dio ◽  
Federico Manzi ◽  
Giulia Peretti ◽  
Angelo Cangelosi ◽  
Paul L. Harris ◽  
...  

Studying trust within human-robot interaction is of great importance given the social relevance of robotic agents in a variety of contexts. We investigated the acquisition, loss and restoration of trust when preschool and school-age children played with either a human or a humanoid robot in-vivo. The relationship between trust and the quality of attachment relationships, Theory of Mind, and executive function skills was also investigated. No differences were found in children’s trust in the play-partner as a function of agency (human or robot). Nevertheless, 3-years-olds showed a trend toward trusting the human more than the robot, while 7-years-olds displayed the reverse behavioral pattern, thus highlighting the developing interplay between affective and cognitive correlates of trust.


Philosophies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 11 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frank Förster

In this article, I assess an existing language acquisition architecture, which was deployed in linguistically unconstrained human–robot interaction, together with experimental design decisions with regard to their enactivist credentials. Despite initial scepticism with respect to enactivism’s applicability to the social domain, the introduction of the notion of participatory sense-making in the more recent enactive literature extends the framework’s reach to encompass this domain. With some exceptions, both our architecture and form of experimentation appear to be largely compatible with enactivist tenets. I analyse the architecture and design decisions along the five enactivist core themes of autonomy, embodiment, emergence, sense-making, and experience, and discuss the role of affect due to its central role within our acquisition experiments. In conclusion, I join some enactivists in demanding that interaction is taken seriously as an irreducible and independent subject of scientific investigation, and go further by hypothesising its potential value to machine learning.


Soft Robotics ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 231-254 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Wolf ◽  
Thomas Bahls ◽  
Maxime Chalon ◽  
Werner Friedl ◽  
Markus Grebenstein ◽  
...  

Micromachines ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (5) ◽  
pp. 485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gianni Stano ◽  
Luca Arleo ◽  
Gianluca Percoco

Air tightness is a challenging task for 3D-printed components, especially for fused filament fabrication (FFF), due to inherent issues, related to the layer-by-layer fabrication method. On the other hand, the capability of 3D print airtight cavities with complex shapes is very attractive for several emerging research fields, such as soft robotics. The present paper proposes a repeatable methodology to 3D print airtight soft actuators with embedded air connectors. The FFF process has been optimized to manufacture monolithic bending PneuNets (MBPs), an emerging class of soft robots. FFF has several advantages in soft robot fabrication: (i) it is a fully automated process which does not require manual tasks as for molding, (ii) it is one of the most ubiquitous and inexpensive (FFF 3D printers costs < $200) 3D-printing technologies, and (iii) more materials can be used in the same printing cycle which allows embedding of several elements in the soft robot body. Using commercial soft filaments and a dual-extruder 3D printer, at first, a novel air connector which can be easily embedded in each soft robot, made via FFF technology with a single printing cycle, has been fabricated and tested. This new embedded air connector (EAC) prevents air leaks at the interface between pneumatic pipe and soft robot and replaces the commercial air connections, often origin of leakages in soft robots. A subsequent experimental study using four different shapes of MBPs, each equipped with EAC, showed the way in which different design configurations can affect bending performance. By focusing on the best performing shape, among the tested ones, the authors studied the relationship between bending performance and air tightness, proving how the Design for Additive Manufacturing approach is essential for advanced applications involving FFF. In particular, the relationship between chamber wall thickness and printing parameters has been analyzed, the thickness of the walls has been studied from 1.6 to 1 mm while maintaining air tightness and improving the bending angle by 76.7% under a pressure of 4 bar. It emerged that the main printing parameter affecting chamber wall air tightness is the line width that, in conjunction with the wall thickness, can ensure air tightness of the soft actuator body.


Author(s):  
Aike C. Horstmann ◽  
Nicole C. Krämer

AbstractSince social robots are rapidly advancing and thus increasingly entering people’s everyday environments, interactions with robots also progress. For these interactions to be designed and executed successfully, this study considers insights of attribution theory to explore the circumstances under which people attribute responsibility for the robot’s actions to the robot. In an experimental online study with a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subjects design (N = 394), people read a vignette describing the social robot Pepper either as an assistant or a competitor and its feedback, which was either positive or negative during a subsequently executed quiz, to be generated autonomously by the robot or to be pre-programmed by programmers. Results showed that feedback believed to be autonomous leads to more attributed agency, responsibility, and competence to the robot than feedback believed to be pre-programmed. Moreover, the more agency is ascribed to the robot, the better the evaluation of its sociability and the interaction with it. However, only the valence of the feedback affects the evaluation of the robot’s sociability and the interaction with it directly, which points to the occurrence of a fundamental attribution error.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 1213-1229
Author(s):  
Anna M. H. Abrams ◽  
Astrid M. Rosenthal-von der Pütten

AbstractThe research community of human-robot interaction relies on theories and phenomena from the social sciences in order to study and validate robotic developments in interaction. These studies mainly concerned one (human) on one (robot) interactions in the past. The present paper shifts the attention to groups and group dynamics and reviews relevant concepts from the social sciences: ingroup identification (I), cohesion (C) and entitativity (E). Ubiquitous robots will be part of larger social settings in the near future. A conceptual framework, the I–C–E framework, is proposed as a theoretical foundation for group (dynamics) research in HRI. Additionally, we present methods and possible measures for these relevant concepts and outline topics for future research.


2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (12) ◽  
pp. 1700016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Panagiotis Polygerinos ◽  
Nikolaus Correll ◽  
Stephen A. Morin ◽  
Bobak Mosadegh ◽  
Cagdas D. Onal ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Leimin Tian ◽  
Sharon Oviatt

Robotic applications have entered various aspects of our lives, such as health care and educational services. In such Human-robot Interaction (HRI), trust and mutual adaption are established and maintained through a positive social relationship between a user and a robot. This social relationship relies on the perceived competence of a robot on the social-emotional dimension. However, because of technical limitations and user heterogeneity, current HRI is far from error-free, especially when a system leaves controlled lab environments and is applied to in-the-wild conditions. Errors in HRI may either degrade a user’s perception of a robot’s capability in achieving a task (defined as performance errors in this work) or degrade a user’s perception of a robot’s socio-affective competence (defined as social errors in this work). The impact of these errors and effective strategies to handle such an impact remains an open question. We focus on social errors in HRI in this work. In particular, we identify the major attributes of perceived socio-affective competence by reviewing human social interaction studies and HRI error studies. This motivates us to propose a taxonomy of social errors in HRI. We then discuss the impact of social errors situated in three representative HRI scenarios. This article provides foundations for a systematic analysis of the social-emotional dimension of HRI. The proposed taxonomy of social errors encourages the development of user-centered HRI systems, designed to offer positive and adaptive interaction experiences and improved interaction outcomes.


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