Search

Mutually adaptive interaction involves the robot as a partner as opposed to a tool, and requires that the robot is susceptible to similar environmental cues and behavior patterns as humans are. Recognition, or the acknowledgement of the other as individual, is fundamental to mutually adaptive interaction between humans. We discuss what recognition involves and its behavioral manifestations, and describe the benefits of implementing it in HRI., Author(s): Ingar Brinck [sup.1], Christian Balkenius [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.4514.4, 0000 0001 0930 2361, Theoretical Philosophy and LUCS Robotics Lab, Department of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, Lund University, , [...]

Author(s): Marco Nørskov [sup.1] [sup.2], Sladjana Nørskov [sup.3] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.7048.b, 0000 0001 1956 2722, Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas, Aarhus University, , Aarhus, Denmark (2) grid.418163.9, [...]

This paper motivates the idea that social robots should be credited as moral patients, building on an argumentative approach that combines virtue ethics and social recognition theory. Our proposal answers the call for a nuanced ethical evaluation of human-robot interaction that does justice to both the robustness of the social responses solicited in humans by robots and the fact that robots are designed to be used as instruments. On the one hand, we acknowledge that the instrumental nature of robots and their unsophisticated social capabilities prevent any attribution of rights to robots, which are devoid of intrinsic moral dignity and personal status. On the other hand, we argue that another form of moral consideration-not based on rights attribution-can and must be granted to robots. The reason is that relationships with robots offer to the human agents important opportunities to cultivate both vices and virtues, like social interaction with other human beings. Our argument appeals to social recognition to explain why social robots, unlike other technological artifacts, are capable of establishing with their human users quasi-social relationships as pseudo-persons. This recognition dynamic justifies seeing robots as worthy of moral consideration from a virtue ethical standpoint as it predicts the pre-reflective formation of persistent affective dispositions and behavioral habits that are capable of corrupting the human user's character. We conclude by drawing attention to a potential paradox drawn forth by our analysis and by examining the main conceptual conundrums that our approach has to face., Author(s): Massimiliano L. Cappuccio [sup.1] [sup.2], Anco Peeters [sup.3], William McDonald [sup.2] Author Affiliations: (1) grid.1005.4, 0000 0004 4902 0432, School of Engineering and Information Technology, University of New South [...]

Abstract In Karel Capek's R.U.R., the mass production of an artificial workforce precipitates several catastrophes that culminate with humanity's extinction. For Harry Domin, Central Director of Rossum's Universal Robots, to [...]

Internet communication technology has been said to affect our sense of self by altering the way we construct 'personal identity,' understood as identificatory valuative narratives about the self; in addition, some authors have warned that internet communication creates special conditions for moral agency that might gradually change our moral intuitions. Both of these effects are attributed to the fact that internet communication is 'disembodied.' Our aim in this paper is to establish a link between this complex of claims and past and ongoing research in phenomenology, empirical psychology and cognitive science, in order to formulate an empirical hypothesis that can assist development and evaluation of recent technology for embodied telecommunication. We first suggest that for the purposes of interdisciplinary exchange, personal identity is formally best represented by a selection function that (for temporal intervals of variable length) 'bundles' capacity ascriptions into identificatory narratives. Based on this model, we discuss which cultural changes engendered by the internet affect the construction of personal identity in ways that diminish our ethical sensitivies. In a second step, working from phenomenological claims by Martin Buber, we argue that disembodied communication severs two modes of cognitive function, preconceptual and conceptual, which tie together moral motivation, self-experience, and identity construction. We translate Buber's claims into the theoretical idiom of the 'theory of cognitive orientation,' a psychological theory of motivation that links up with recent research in embodied cognition. In a third step, we investigate whether the embodiment of the internet with communication robots (e.g., telenoids) holds out the prospect of reverting this structural change at least partially. We conclude by formulating an empirical hypothesis (for researchers in cognitive science) that has direct import, we submit, on the question whether embodied telecommunication promises a new form of ethically sensitive selfconstituting encounter. Keywords Personal identity * Embodied internet communication * Teleoperated communication robots * Cognitive orientation * Embodied cognition * Philosophy of dialogue * Second person cognitive science * Moral cognition, Internet communication technology has changed our communicational practices in ways that seem to affect our self-understanding. Are we losing our sense of self in the multiplication of our 'identities' or [...]

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2009.09.015 Byline: Rachel Kirby (a), Jodi Forlizzi (b), Reid Simmons (a) Abstract: For human-robot interaction to proceed in a smooth, natural manner, robots must adhere to human social norms. One such human convention is the use of expressive moods and emotions as an integral part of social interaction. Such expressions are used to convey messages such as 'I'm happy to see you' or 'I want to be comforted,' and people's long-term relationships depend heavily on shared emotional experiences. Thus, we have developed an affective model for social robots. This generative model attempts to create natural, human-like affect and includes distinctions between immediate emotional responses, the overall mood of the robot, and long-term attitudes toward each visitor to the robot, with a focus on developing long-term human-robot relationships. This paper presents the general affect model as well as particular details of our implementation of the model on one robot, the Roboceptionist. In addition, we present findings from two studies that demonstrate the model's potential. Author Affiliation: (a) Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA (b) Carnegie Mellon University, Human-Computer Interaction Institute and Design Department, 5000 Forbes Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA Article History: Received 25 July 2007; Revised 4 September 2009; Accepted 21 September 2009 Article Note: (footnote) [star] This work was funded in part by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to the first author and by NSF grants #IIS-0329014 and #IIS-0121426. Portions of this work have appeared previously in Gockley et al. (2006) .

Identifying the extent to which the appearance of a humanoid robot affects human behavior toward it is important. We compared participant impressions of and behaviors toward two real humanoid robots in simple human-robot interactions. These two robots, which have different appearances but are controlled to perform the same recorded utterances and motions, are adjusted by a motion-capturing system. We conducted an experiment with 48 human participants who individually interacted with the two robots and also with a human for reference. The results revealed that different appearances did not affect participant verbal behaviors, but they did affect such nonverbal behaviors as distance and delay of response. These differences are explained by two factors: impressions and attributions. Index Terms--Body movement analysis, humanoid robots, human-robot interaction (HRI), robot appearance.

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2007.09.014 Byline: Paul Fitzpatrick (a), Giorgio Metta (a)(b), Lorenzo Natale (a) Abstract: Robot projects are often evolutionary dead ends, with the software and hardware they produce disappearing without trace afterwards. In humanoid robotics, a small field with an avid appetite for novel devices, we experience a great deal of 'churn' of this nature. In this paper, we explore how best to make our projects stable and long-lasting, without compromising our ability to constantly change our sensors, actuators, processors and networks. We also look at how to encourage the propagation and evolution of hardware designs, so that we can start to build up a 'gene-pool' of material to draw upon for new projects. We advance on two fronts, software and hardware. For some time, we have been developing and using the YARP robot software architecture [Giorgio Metta, Paul Fitzpatrick, Lorenzo Natale, YARP: Yet another robot platform, International Journal on Advanced Robotics Systems 3 (2006) 43-48], which helps organize communication between sensors, processors, and actuators so that loose coupling is encouraged, making gradual system evolution much easier. YARP includes a model of communication that is transport-neutral, so that data flow is decoupled from the details of the underlying networks and protocols in use. Importantly for the long term, YARP is designed to play well with other architectures. Device drivers written for YARP can be ripped out and used without any 'middleware'. On the network, basic interoperation is possible with a few lines of code in any language with a socket library, and maximally efficient interoperation can be achieved by following documented protocols. These features are not normally the first things that end-users look for when starting a project, but they are crucial for longevity. We emphasize the strategic utility of the Free Software social contract [B. Perens, The open source definition, in: Chris DiBona, Sam Ockman, Mark Stone (Eds.), Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution, O'Reilly and Associates, Cambridge, MA, 1999] to software development for small communities with idiosyncratic requirements. We also work to expand our community by releasing the design of our ICub humanoid [N.G. Tsagarakis, G. Metta, G. Sandini, D. Vernon, R. Beira, F. Becchi, L. Righetti, J. Santos-Victor, A.J. Ijspeert, M.C. Carrozza, D.G. Caldwell, iCub -- The design and realization of an open humanoid platform for cognitive and neuroscience research, Journal of Advanced Robotics 21 (10) (2007) 1151-1175] under a free and open licence, and funding development using this platform. Author Affiliation: (a) Italian Institute of Technology, Via Morego, 30, 16163 Genova, Italy (b) LIRA-Lab, University of Genoa, Viale F. Causa, 13, 16145 Genova, Italy

Enabling robots to read human behaviour and to respond in appropriate ways is a burgeoning area of research. As is the study of how humans will react to these potentially [...]

A state-of-the-art social robot was immersed in a classroom of toddlers for >5 months. The quality of the interaction between children and robots improved steadily for 27 sessions, quickly deteriorated for 15 sessions when the robot was reprogrammed to behave in a predictable manner, and improved in the last three sessions when the robot displayed again its full behavioral repertoire. Initially, the children treated the robot very differently than the way they treated each other. By the last sessions, 5 months later, they treated the robot as a peer rather than as a toy. Results indicate that current robot technology is surprisingly close to achieving autonomous bonding and socialization with human toddlers for sustained periods of time and that it could have great potential in educational settings assisting teachers and enriching the classroom environment. human-robot interaction | social development | social robotics

Interactive robots participating in our daily fives should have the fundamental ability to socially communicate with humans. In this paper, we propose a mechanism for two social communication abilities: forming long-term relationships and estimating friendly relationships among people. The mechanism for long-term relationships is based on three principles of behavior design. The robot we developed, Robovie, is able to interact with children in the same way as children do. Moreover, the mechanism is designed for long-term interaction along the following three design principles: 1) it calls children by name using radio frequency identification tags; 2) it adapts its interactive behaviors for each child based on a pseudo development mechanism; and 3) it confides its personal matters to the children who have interacted with the robot for an extended period of time. Regarding the estimation of friendly relationships, the robot assumes that people who spontaneously behave as a group together are friends. Then, by identifying each person in the interacting group around the robot, it estimates the relationships between them. We conducted a two-month field trial at an elementary school. An interactive humanoid robot, Robovie, was placed in a classroom at the school. The results of the field trial revealed that the robot successfully continued interacting with many children for two months, and seemed to have established friendly relationships with them. In addition, it demonstrated reasonable performance in identifying friendships among children. We believe that these results demonstrate the potential of current interactive robots to establish social relationships with humans in our daily lives. Index Terms--Field trial, friendship estimation, human-robot interaction, long-term interaction, longitudinal study.

A crucial skill for fluent action meshing in human team activity is a learned and calculated selection of anticipatory actions. We believe that the same holds for robotic teammates, if they are to perform in a similarly fluent manner with their human counterparts. In this work, we describe a model for human-robot joint action, and propose an adaptive action selection mechanism for a robotic teammate, which makes anticipatory decisions based on the confidence of their validity and their relative risk. We conduct an analysis of our method, predicting an improvement in task efficiency compared to a purely reactive process. We then present results from a study involving untrained human subjects working with a simulated version of a robot using our system. We show a significant improvement in best-case task efficiency when compared to a group of users working with a reactive agent, as well as a significant difference in the perceived commitment of the robot to the team and its contribution to the team's fluency and success. By way of explanation, we raise a number of fluency metric hypotheses, and evaluate their significance between the two study conditions. Index Terms--Algorithms, anticipatory action selection, fluency, human factors, human-robot interaction, teamwork.

To purchase or authenticate to the full-text of this article, please visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2006.00318.x Byline: Kwan Min Lee (1), Wei Peng (2), Seung-A Jin (1), Chang Yan (1) Abstract: Personality is an essential feature for creating socially interactive robots. Studies on this dimension will facilitate enhanced human-robot interaction (HRI). Using AIBO, a social robotic pet developed by Sony, we examined the issue of personality in HRI. In this gender-balanced 2 (AIBO personality: introvert vs. extrovert) by 2 (participant personality: introvert vs. extrovert) between-subject experiment (N = 48), we found that participants could accurately recognize a robot's personality based on its verbal and nonverbal behaviors. In addition, various complementarity attraction effects were found in HRI. Participants enjoyed interacting with a robot more when the robot's personality was complementary to their own personalities than when the robot's personality was similar to their own personalities. The same complementarity attraction effect was found in participants' evaluation of the robot's intelligence and social attraction. Participants' feelings of social presence during the interaction were a significant mediator for the complementarity attraction effects observed. Practical and theoretical implications of the current study for the design of social robots and the study of HRI were discussed. Author Affiliation: (1)Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA 90089 (2)Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies & Media, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824 Article note: Kwan Min Lee; e-mail: kwanminl@usc.edu.