scholarly journals Expressing Robot Personality through Talking Body Language

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 4639
Author(s):  
Unai Zabala ◽  
Igor Rodriguez ◽  
José María Martínez-Otzeta ◽  
Elena Lazkano
Keyword(s):  
Humanoid Robot ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Body Posture ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Human Interactions ◽  
Rich Variety

Social robots must master the nuances of human communication as a mean to convey an effective message and generate trust. It is well-known that non-verbal cues are very important in human interactions, and therefore a social robot should produce a body language coherent with its discourse. In this work, we report on a system that endows a humanoid robot with the ability to adapt its body language according to the sentiment of its speech. A combination of talking beat gestures with emotional cues such as eye lightings, body posture of voice intonation and volume permits a rich variety of behaviors. The developed approach is not purely reactive, and it easily allows to assign a kind of personality to the robot. We present several videos with the robot in two different scenarios, and showing discrete and histrionic personalities.

scholarly journals Vulnerable robots positively shape human conversational dynamics in a human–robot team

2020 ◽  
Vol 117 (12) ◽  
pp. 6370-6375 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaret L. Traeger ◽  
Sarah Strohkorb Sebo ◽  
Malte Jung ◽  
Brian Scassellati ◽  
Nicholas A. Christakis
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Hybrid Systems ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Artificial Agents ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Control Groups ◽  
Collaborative Game

Social robots are becoming increasingly influential in shaping the behavior of humans with whom they interact. Here, we examine how the actions of a social robot can influence human-to-human communication, and not just robot–human communication, using groups of three humans and one robot playing 30 rounds of a collaborative game (n= 51 groups). We find that people in groups with a robot making vulnerable statements converse substantially more with each other, distribute their conversation somewhat more equally, and perceive their groups more positively compared to control groups with a robot that either makes neutral statements or no statements at the end of each round. Shifts in robot speech have the power not only to affect how people interact with robots, but also how people interact with each other, offering the prospect for modifying social interactions via the introduction of artificial agents into hybrid systems of humans and machines.

scholarly journals An approach for a social robot to understand human relationships

2006 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 369-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Takayuki Kanda ◽  
Hiroshi Ishiguro
Keyword(s):  
Elementary School ◽  
Field Experiment ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Social Relationships ◽  
Humanoid Robot ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Human Relationships

This paper reports our research efforts on social robots that recognize interpersonal relationships. These investigations are carried out by observing group behaviors while the robot interacts with people. Our humanoid robot interacts with children by speaking and making various gestures. It identifies individual children by using a wireless tag system, which helps to promote interaction such as the robot calling a child by name. Accordingly, the robot is capable of interacting with many children, causing spontaneous group behavior from the children around it. Here, group behavior is associated with social relationships among the children themselves. For example, a child may be accompanied by his or her friends and then play together with them. We propose the hypothesis that our interactive robot prompts a child’s friends to accompany him or her; thus, we can estimate their friendship by simply observing their accompanying behaviors. We conducted a field experiment for two weeks in a Japanese elementary school to verify this hypothesis. In the experiment, two “Robovie” robots were placed where children could freely interact with them during recesses. As a result, we found that they mostly prompted friend-accompanying behavior. Moreover, we could estimate some of their friendly relationships, in particular among the children who often appeared around the robot. For example, we could estimate 5% of all friendships with 80% accuracy, and 15% of them with nearly 50% accuracy. Thus, this result basically supports our hypothesis on friendship estimation from an interactive humanoid robot. We believe that this ability to estimate human relationships is essential for robots to behave socially.

scholarly journals Patient—Doctor Interactions: Emotional Cues and Discussing Prognosis

2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (10) ◽  
pp. 598-604
Author(s):  
Jill Thistlethwaite
Keyword(s):  
General Practice ◽  
Psychological Distress ◽  
Communication Skills ◽  
Life Stories ◽  
Body Language ◽  
Previous Knowledge ◽  
Verbal Cues ◽  
Good Communication ◽  
Emotional Cues ◽  
Emotional Interaction

The patient—doctor consultation in general practice is often an emotional interaction — for both the patient and the GP. The exchange of life stories and experiences may be joyful or sad, distressing or precipitate anger. Patients may not express their emotions in words. Depending on their personalities, reaction to distressing news and their ideas and expectations, they may say things that are dissonant from how they are feeling. The GP with good communication skills may be able to elicit the patient's feelings through a combination of intuition based on experience, previous knowledge of the patient and the patient's body language including non-verbal cues. Then the GP must acknowledge and respond appropriately to them. Non-effective communication may worsen psychological distress and delay adjustment to the disease or condition.

Group exercises aimed at poor body posture correction assisted by humanoid robot - A case study

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleksandra Mikov ◽  
Dragana Vukliš ◽  
Branislav Borovac ◽  
Milan Gnjatović ◽  
Jovica Tasevski ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Humanoid Robot ◽  
Body Posture

scholarly journals Mitigating Children’s Pain and Anxiety during Blood Draw Using Social Robots

Electronics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (10) ◽  
pp. 1211
Author(s):  
Matthijs H. J. Smakman ◽  
Koen Smit ◽  
Lotte Buser ◽  
Tom Monshouwer ◽  
Nigel van Putten ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Healthcare Professionals ◽  
Young Patients ◽  
Hospital Setting ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Blood Collection ◽  
Medical Procedure ◽  
Blood Draw ◽  
The Social ◽  
Children's Pain

Young pediatric patients who undergo venipuncture or capillary blood sampling often experience high levels of pain and anxiety. This often results in distressed young patients and their parents, increased treatment times, and a higher workload for healthcare professionals. Social robots are a new and promising tool to mitigate children’s pain and anxiety. This study aims to purposefully design and test a social robot for mitigating stress and anxiety during blood draw of children. We first programmed a social robot based on the requirements expressed by experienced healthcare professionals during focus group sessions. Next, we designed a randomized controlled experiment in which the social robot was applied as a distraction method to measure its capacity to mitigate pain and anxiety in children during blood draw in a children’s hospital setting. Children who interacted with the robot showed significantly lower levels of anxiety before actual blood collection, compared to children who received regular medical treatment. Children in the middle classes of primary school (aged 6–9) seemed especially sensitive to the robot’s ability to mitigate pain and anxiety before blood draw. Children’s parents overall expressed strong positive attitudes toward the use and effectiveness of the social robot for mitigating pain and anxiety. The results of this study demonstrate that social robots can be considered a new and effective tool for lowering children’s anxiety prior to the distressing medical procedure of blood collection.

scholarly journals The Social Robot in Rehabilitation and Assistance: What is the Future?

Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Daniele Giansanti
Keyword(s):  
The Elderly ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Clinical Use ◽  
Research Development ◽  
Future Directions ◽  
Collaborative Robotics ◽  
Research Perspectives ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Future

This commentary aims to address the field of social robots both in terms of the global situation and research perspectives. It has four polarities. First, it revisits the evolutions in robotics, which, starting from collaborative robotics, has led to the diffusion of social robots. Second, it illustrates the main fields in the employment of social robots in rehabilitation and assistance in the elderly and handicapped and in further emerging sectors. Third, it takes a look at the future directions of the research development both in terms of clinical and technological aspects. Fourth, it discusses the opportunities and limits, starting from the development and clinical use of social robots during the COVID-19 pandemic to the increase of ethical discussion on their use.

scholarly journals The Social Robot and the Digital Physiotherapist: Are We Ready for the Team Play?

Healthcare ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (11) ◽  
pp. 1454
Author(s):  
Rossella Simeoni ◽  
Federico Colonnelli ◽  
Veronica Eutizi ◽  
Matteo Marchetti ◽  
Elena Paolini ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Performance Monitoring ◽  
Digital Health ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Work Processes ◽  
Feedback Form ◽  
Electronic Survey ◽  
The Social ◽  
Two Samples ◽  
Periodic Monitoring

Motivation: We are witnessing two phenomena. The first is that the physiotherapist is increasingly becoming a figure that must interact with Digital Health. On the other hand, social robots through research are improving more and more in the aspects of social interaction thanks also to artificial intelligence and becoming useful in rehabilitation processes. It begins to become strategic to investigate the intersections between these two phenomena. Objective: Therefore, we set ourselves the goal of investigating the consensus and opinion of physiotherapists around the introduction of social robots in clinical practice both in rehabilitation and assistance. Procedure: An electronic survey has been developed focused on social robot-based rehabilitation and assistance and has been submitted to subjects focused on physiotherapy sciences to investigate their opinion and their level of consent regarding the use of the social robot in rehabilitation and assistance. Two samples of subjects were recruited: the first group (156 participating subjects, 79 males, 77 females, mean age 24.3 years) was in the training phase, and the second (167 participating subjects, 86 males, 81 females, mean age 42.4 years) group was involved in the work processes. An electronic feedback form was also submitted to investigate the acceptance of the proposed methodology. Results: The survey showed a consistency of the results between the two samples from which interesting considerations emerge. Contrary to stereotypes that report how AI-based devices put jobs at risk, physiotherapists are not afraid of these devices. The subjects involved in the study believe the following: (a) social robots can be reliable co-workers but will remain a complementary device; (b) their role will be of the utmost importance as an operational manager in their use and in performance monitoring; (c) these devices will allow an increase in working capacity and facilitate integration. All those involved in the study believe that the proposed electronic survey has proved to be a useful and effective tool that can be useful as a periodic monitoring tool and useful for scientific societies. Conclusions: The evolution of social robots represents an unstoppable process as does the increase in the aging of the population. Stakeholders must not look with suspicion toward these devices, which can represent an important resource, but rather invest in monitoring and consensus training initiatives.

The Rights of (Social) Robots

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
David J. Gunkel
Keyword(s):  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Legal Standing ◽  
Practical Guidance ◽  
Robot Rights

A number of recent publications have examined and advanced the concept of robot rights. These investigations have been largely theoretical and speculative. This paper seeks to move the debate about the moral and legal standing of social robots out of the realm of theory. It does so by investigating what rights a social robot would need to have in order to facilitate responsible integration of these technologies into our world. The analysis, therefore, seeks to formulate practical guidance for developing an intelligent and executable plan for culturally sustainable social robots.

Object Recognition Pipeline

2018 ◽  
pp. 18-33
Author(s):  
John Alejandro Castro Vargas ◽  
Alberto Garcia Garcia ◽  
Sergiu Oprea ◽  
Sergio Orts Escolano ◽  
Jose Garcia Rodriguez
Keyword(s):  
Object Recognition ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
Degree Of Disability ◽  
Domestic Environments ◽  
Domestic Assistance

Object grasping in domestic environments using social robots has an enormous potential to help dependent people with a certain degree of disability. In this chapter, the authors make use of the well-known Pepper social robot to carry out such task. They provide an integrated solution using ROS to recognize and grasp simple objects. That system was deployed on an accelerator platform (Jetson TX1) to be able to perform object recognition in real time using RGB-D sensors attached to the robot. By using the system, the authors prove that the Pepper robot shows a great potential for such domestic assistance tasks.

scholarly journals Social robots: The influence of human and robot characteristics on acceptance

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 346-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Bishop ◽  
Anouk van Maris ◽  
Sanja Dogramadzi ◽  
Nancy Zook
Keyword(s):  
Social Robots ◽  
Social Robot ◽  
User Characteristics ◽  
Video Clips ◽  
Robot Acceptance ◽  
Gender And Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Gender Education ◽  
Implicit And Explicit ◽  
Explicit Measures

AbstractResearch in social robotics is focused on the development of robots that can provide physical and cognitive support in a socially interactive way. Whilst some studies have previously investigated the importance of user characteristics (age, gender, education, robot familiarity, mood) in the acceptance of social robots as well as the influence a robot’s displayed emotion (positive, negative, neutral) has on the interaction, these two aspects are rarely combined. Therefore, this study attempts to highlight the need to consider the influence that both human and robot attributes can have on social robot acceptance. Eighty-six participants completed implicit and explicit measures of mood before viewing one of three video clips containing a positive, negative or neutral social robot (Pepper) followed by questionnaires on robot acceptance and perception. Gender and education were not associated with acceptance; however, several constructs of the acceptance questionnaire significantly correlated with age and mood. For example, those younger and those experiencing sadness or loneliness were more dependent on the opinions of others (as measured by the social influence construct of the acceptance questionnaire). This highlights the importance of mood in the introduction of social robots into vulnerable populations. Robot familiarity also correlated with robot acceptance with those more familiar finding the robot less useful and less enjoyable, this is important as robots become more prominent in society. Displayed robot emotion significantly influenced acceptance and perception with the positive robot appearing more childlike than the negative and neutral robot, and the neutral robot the least helpful. These findings emphasise the importance of both user and robot characteristics in the successful integration of social robots.

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