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Research has shown that a pet robot could constitute a leverage point to open a communication channel in a triadic relation between a person with dementia and others. Additionally, tangible light projections have been shown to capture the attention of people with dementia and contribute to social interaction. Following these findings, we designed a prototype of a light-enhanced Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) for people with dementia using the robot Pleo and tested its potential to foster social interaction with 19 experts in the field of dementia and care technology in a within-subjects online study. Experts were shown a video of the prototype, as well as two videos of comparable activities with only the light or only the robot. Results showed no significant differences in the activities’ potential to stimulate social interaction and enjoyment, while they disclosed that the light-enhanced HRI could be more difficult to understand at a cognitive level. While experts considered the robot-only activity as more suited for individual interactions, they perceived the light-enhanced HRI as more suited for small sized groups. This latter result seems to suggest that adding a tangible light to an HRI for people with dementia could convert it from an individual to a group activity.

Improving the quality of life of people with dementia in long-term care facilities is very important and can be achieved by designing engaging activities for the residents. The introduction of social robots for people with dementia has already proven its benefits, and we expected that adding contextual cues to this interaction would enhance the positive engagement of these individuals. A total of five participants took part in a comparison study in which they engaged in a free-play session with the robot PLEO and in a free-play session with the robot PLEO within a jungle-themed context. The gaze and arm/hand behaviors of the participants were measured and were used to determine the level of their engagement. Contrary to our expectations, we found a significant decrease in engagement for the sessions where the context was added to the interaction. Our explanation of this result is that the added cues increased the threshold to interact with the robot, but the elderly were still engaged as spectators.

Social robots are now being considered to be a part of the therapy of children with autism. During the interactions, some aggressive behaviors could lead to harmful scenarios. The ability of a social robot to detect such behaviors and react to intervene or to notify the therapist would improve the outcomes of therapy and prevent any potential harm toward another person or to the robot. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of an artificial neural network in classifying 6 interaction behaviors between a child and a small robotic toy. The behaviors were: hit, shake, throw, pickup, drop, and no interaction or idle. Due to the ease of acquiring data from adult participants, a model was developed based on adults' data and was evaluated with children's data. The developed model was able to achieve promising results based on the accuracy (i.e. 80%), classification report (i.e. overall F1-score=80%), and confusion matrix. The findings highlight the possibility of characterizing children's negative interactions with robotic toys to improve safety. - 2019 IEEE. The work is supported by a research grant from Qatar University under the grant No. QUST-1-CENG-2019-10. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. Scopus

Service robots are expected to closely interact with humans in the near future. Their tasks often include delivering and taking objects. Thus, handover scenarios play an important role in human-robot-interaction. A lot of work in this field of research focuses on speed, accuracy and predictability of the robot’s movement during object handover. Those robots need to closely interact with naive users and not only experts. In order to evaluate handover interaction performance between human and robot a force measurement based approach was implemented on the humanoid robot Floka. Different gestures with the second arm were added to analyze the influence on synchronization, predictability, and human acceptance. In this paper we present a study where users with different levels of experience were asked to help the robot to learn new objects. We evaluated the impact of previous knowledge with robots on handover interactions. Disparities in timing, distance, and applied force during handover could be observed. We present an automated annotation pipeline for human-robot-interaction that will be used in future studies. While the commonly used force measurement based approach proved to be a valid starting point, our results show that naive user interaction could benefit from better anticipation.

We present design strategies for Human Robot Interaction for school-aged autistic children with limited receptive language. Applying these strategies to the DE-ENIGMA project (large EU project addressing emotion recognition in autistic children) supported development of a new activity for in facial expression imitation whereby the robot imitates the child's face to encourage the child to notice facial expressions in a play-based game. A usability case study with 15 typically-developing children aged 4--6 at an English-language school in the Netherlands was performed to observe the feasibility of the setup and make design revisions before exposing the robot to autistic children.

Preventing diseases of affluence is one of the major challenges for our future society. Recently, robots have been introduced as support for people on dieting or rehabilitation tasks. In our current work, we are investigating how the companionship and acknowledgement of a socially assistive robot (SAR) can influence the user to persist longer on a planking task. We conducted a 2 (acknowledgement vs. no-acknowledgment) x 2 (instructing vs. exercising together) x 1 (baseline) study with 96 subjects. We observed a motivational gain if the robot is exercising together with the user or if the robot is giving acknowledging feedback. However, we could not find an increase in motivation if the robot is showing both behaviors. We attribute the later finding to ceiling effects and discuss why we could not find an additional performance gain. Moreover, we highlight implications for SAR researchers developing robots to motivate people to extend exercising duration.

In this paper, we discuss the prevalence of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in the Gulf region. We examine the importance of providing state-of-the-art ASD interventions, and highlight social robots as therapeutic tools that have gained popularity for their use in ASD therapy in the West. We also elaborate on the features of social robots that make them effective and describe how they can be used in such settings. We then emphasize the significance of taking cultural context into account in order to develop indigenous tools for ASD therapy, and explain the different ways in which social robots can be made culturally adaptive to maximize their potential impact on children with ASD. Springer International Publishing AG 2016. The work is supported by an NPRP grant from the Qatar National Research Fund under the grant No. NPRP 7-673-2-251. The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors. Scopus

Among social infrastructure technologies, Robot Technology (RT) is expected to play an important role in solving the problems of the aging society. New generations of personal robots are expected to be capable of assisting humans in a variety of contexts and thus of interacting and communicating with them effectively and even in a friendly and natural way. Expressing human-like emotions is an important capability to this aim. The objectives of this work are the design and development of two five-fingered robotic hands for a humanoid upper body able to generate and express emotions. The specific design goals have been grasping and expression of emotions through hand gestures, as a complement to facial expression of emotions. The paper presents the design process of the robotic hands, named RCH-1 (Robocasa Hand No. 1), starting from the requirements deriving from their use in grasping and gestures. The resulting robotic hands are described in detail, together with the hand sensory systems. Experimental trials are then presented, aimed at assessing the hand performance and at validating their effectiveness in grasping and emotion expression, when mounted on the emotion expression humanoid robot WE-4R (Waseda Eye No. 4 Refined).

This paper investigates the tactile signals involved during an object passing task as performed by human subjects. Using various sensors, we analyzed the forces and accelerations involved during the transfer of an object from one hand to another. We determined the normal forces, shear forces and accelerations that were occurring during the transfer phase of the object. Such analysis could be useful for a prosthetic or humanoid robotic hand that could perform object transfers in a more natural manner.

Robots might be helpful in light of the increasing number of children diagnosed with autism. Before we test the robots with children with autism, we first describe our first steps in investigating the effectiveness of robots as they interact with normally developing children. In this paper, we used a humanoid robot to tell a social story to introduce basic skills on social interaction. We developed a social story on "Greeting Others" and pilot-tested it on a normally developing 5-year old girl. We report a few of the qualitative findings that we found during the interaction of the robot and the child to provide fundamental design guidelines for future design of robots that interact with children and possibly for children with autism as well.

This paper aimed to explore whether human beings can understand gestures produced by telepresence robots. If it were the case, they can derive meaning conveyed in telerobotic gestures when processing spatial information. We conducted two experiments over Skype in the present study. Participants were presented with a robotic interface that had arms, which were teleoperated by an experimenter. The robot could point to virtual locations that represented certain entities. In Experiment 1, the experimenter described spatial locations of fictitious objects sequentially in two conditions: speech condition (SO, verbal descriptions clearly indicated the spatial layout) and speech and gesture condition (SR, verbal descriptions were ambiguous but accompanied by robotic pointing gestures). Participants were then asked to recall the objects' spatial locations. We found that the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was on par with that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures compensated ambiguous speech during the process of spatial information. In Experiment 2, the experimenter described spatial locations non-sequentially in the SR and SO conditions. Surprisingly, the number of spatial locations recalled in the SR condition was even higher than that in the SO condition, suggesting that telerobotic pointing gestures were more powerful than speech in conveying spatial information when information was presented in an unpredictable order. The findings provide evidence that human beings are able to comprehend telerobotic gestures, and importantly, integrate these gestures with co-occurring speech. This work promotes engaging remote collaboration among humans through a robot intermediary., Comment: 27 pages, 7 figures

In this paper, we present the design of a social robot, Nancy, which is developed as a platform for engaging social interaction. Targeting for a social, safe, interactive and user-friendly robot mate, the design philosophy of Nancy is presented with mechanical, electrical, artificial skin and software specifications. In particular, there are 32 degrees of freedom (DOFs) through the whole body of Nancy, and the social intelligence is implemented based on vision, audio and control subsystems.

Touch often tells us much more than verbal or visual cues ever can. Hence, the human touch plays a very important role in human interactions for expressing their emotions and feelings to others. Understanding this behavior is important in building relationships. This paper is aimed at understanding the patting gesture by analyzing the amount of contact forces on the hand and the angular motions of the finger joints. Finally, the result of this work can be used to set the parameters in developing a humanoid robot that can replicate the patting gesture.

In the above-named article [ibid., vol. 4, no. 4, pp. 305-314, Dec. 2012], the current affiliation within the biography of J.-J. Cabibihan was mistakenly written as Gemalto Singapore, Singapore. That is the current affiliation of S. Pramanik. Dr. Cabibihan's current affiliation is the National University of Singapore.