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Mentalizing, where humans infer the mental states of others, facilitates understanding and interaction in social situations. Humans also tend to adopt mentalizing strategies when interacting with robotic agents. There is an ongoing debate about how inferred mental states affect gaze following, a key component of joint attention. Although the gaze from a robot induces gaze following, the impact of mental state attribution on robotic gaze following remains unclear. To address this question, we asked forty-nine young adults to perform a gaze cueing task during which mental state attribution was manipulated as follows. Participants sat facing a robot that turned its head to the screen at its left or right. Their task was to respond to targets that appeared either at the screen the robot gazed at or at the other screen. At the baseline, the robot was positioned so that participants would perceive it as being able to see the screens. We expected faster response times to targets at the screen the robot gazed at than targets at the non-gazed screen (i.e., gaze cueing effect). In the experimental condition, the robot's line of sight was occluded by a physical barrier such that participants would perceive it as unable to see the screens. Our results revealed gaze cueing effects in both conditions although the effect was reduced in the occluded condition compared to the baseline. These results add to the expanding fields of social cognition and human-robot interaction by suggesting that mentalizing has an impact on robotic gaze following.

For effective human-robot collaboration, it is crucial for robots to understand requests from users perceiving the three-dimensional space and ask reasonable follow-up questions when there are ambiguities. While comprehending the users’ object descriptions in the requests, existing studies have focused on this challenge for limited object categories that can be detected or localized with existing object detection and localization modules. Further, they have mostly focused on comprehending the object descriptions using flat RGB images without considering the depth dimension. On the other hand, in the wild, it is impossible to limit the object categories that can be encountered during the interaction, and 3-dimensional space perception that includes depth information is fundamental in successful task completion. To understand described objects and resolve ambiguities in the wild, for the first time, we suggest a method leveraging explainability. Our method focuses on the active areas of an RGB scene to find the described objects without putting the previous constraints on object categories and natural language instructions. We further improve our method to identify the described objects considering depth dimension. We evaluate our method in varied real-world images and observe that the regions suggested by our method can help resolve ambiguities. When we compare our method with a state-of-the-art baseline, we show that our method performs better in scenes with ambiguous objects which cannot be recognized by existing object detectors. We also show that using depth features significantly improves performance in scenes where depth data is critical to disambiguate the objects and across our evaluation dataset that contains objects that can be specified with and without the depth dimension.

Our work is motivated by the idea that social robots can help inclusive processes in groups of children, focusing on the case of children who have newly arrived from a foreign country and their peers at school. Building on an initial study where we tested different robot behaviours and recorded children’s interactions mediated by a robot in a game, we present in this paper the findings from a subsequent analysis of the same video data drawing from ethnomethodology and conversation analysis. We describe how this approach differs from predominantly quantitative video analysis in HRI; how mutual gaze appeared as a challenging interactional accomplishment between unacquainted children, and why we focused on this phenomenon. We identify two situations and trajectories in which children make eye contact: asking for or giving instructions, and sharing an emotional reaction. Based on detailed analyses of a selection of extracts in the empirical section, we describe patterns and discuss the links between the different situations and trajectories, and relationship building. Our findings inform HRI and robot design by identifying complex interactional accomplishments between two children, as well as group dynamics which support these interactions. We argue that social robots should be able to perceive such phenomena in order to better support inclusion of outgroup children. Lastly, by explaining how we combined approaches and showing how they build on each other, we also hope to demonstrate the value of interdisciplinary research, and encourage it.

The field of human-robot interaction (HRI) research is multidisciplinary and requires researchers to understand diverse fields including computer science, engineering, informatics, philosophy, psychology, and more disciplines. However, it is hard to be an expert in everything. To help HRI researchers develop methodological skills, especially in areas that are relatively new to them, we conducted a virtual workshop, Workshop Your Study Design (WYSD), at the 2021 International Conference on HRI. In this workshop, we grouped participants with mentors, who are experts in areas like real-world studies, empirical lab studies, questionnaire design, interview, participatory design, and statistics. During and after the workshop, participants discussed their proposed study methods, obtained feedback, and improved their work accordingly. In this paper, we present 1) Workshop attendees’ feedback about the workshop and 2) Lessons that the participants learned during their discussions with mentors. Participants’ responses about the workshop were positive, and future scholars who wish to run such a workshop can consider implementing their suggestions. The main contribution of this paper is the lessons learned section, where the workshop participants contributed to forming this section based on what participants discovered during the workshop. We organize lessons learned into themes of 1) Improving study design for HRI, 2) How to work with participants - especially children -, 3) Making the most of the study and robot’s limitations, and 4) How to collaborate well across fields as they were the areas of the papers submitted to the workshop. These themes include practical tips and guidelines to assist researchers to learn about fields of HRI research with which they have limited experience. We include specific examples, and researchers can adapt the tips and guidelines to their own areas to avoid some common mistakes and pitfalls in their research.

A longstanding barrier to deploying robots in the real world is the ongoing need to author robot behavior. Remote data collection–particularly crowdsourcing—is increasingly receiving interest. In this paper, we make the argument to scale robot programming to the crowd and present an initial investigation of the feasibility of this proposed method. Using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface, non-experts created simple robot programs for two typical robot tasks (navigation and pick-and-place). Each needed four subtasks with an increasing number of programming statements (if statement, while loop, variables) for successful completion of the programs. Initial findings of an online study (N = 279) indicate that non-experts, after minimal instruction, were able to create simple programs using an off-the-shelf visual programming interface. We discuss our findings and identify future avenues for this line of research.

Role-play scenarios have been considered a successful learning space for children to develop their social and emotional abilities. In this paper, we investigate whether socially assistive robots in role-playing settings are as effective with small groups of children as they are with a single child and whether individual factors such as gender, grade level (first vs. second), perception of the robots (peer vs. adult), and empathy level (low vs. high) play a role in these two interaction contexts. We conducted a three-week repeated exposure experiment where 40 children interacted with socially assistive robotic characters that acted out interactive stories around words that contribute to expanding children’s emotional vocabulary. Our results showed that although participants who interacted alone with the robots recalled the stories better than participants in the group condition, no significant differences were found in children’s emotional interpretation of the narratives. With regard to individual differences, we found that a single child setting appeared more appropriate to first graders than a group setting, empathy level is an important predictor for emotional understanding of the narratives, and children’s performance varies depending on their perception of the robots (peer vs. adult) in the two conditions.