A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots

1. A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots Terrance Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh, Kerstin Dautenhahn Presentation by Dan Hartmann dhartman, CS296-3

2. Context - History • The first work in social robotics involved stigmergy as a model for behavior in insect colonies • Stigmergy was described to explain how social insect societies produce complex behavior patterns, from individuals performing simple ones. dhartman, CS296-3

3. Insect societies are anonymous, homogenous groups. Many animals form individual societies, where each member forms relationships and social networks Context - Societies dhartman, CS296-3

4. Context – Breazeal’s Four Classes of Social Robots • Socially Evocative • Relies on the human tendency to anthropomorphize • Social Interface • Provides a natural interface by employing human-like social cues • Socially Receptive • Socially Passive but benefits from interaction • e.g. learning from demonstration • Sociable • Pro-actively engages with humans to satisfy internal social aims dhartman, CS296-3

5. Context – Three More Suggested Classes • Socially Intelligent • Show aspects of human style social intelligence, based on deep models of human cognition. • Socially Situated • Surrounded by a social environment, they must be able to distinguish between social agents and other objects. • Socially Embedded • Physically connected to a social environment requiring at least rudimentary social concepts, such as taking turns. dhartman, CS296-3

6. This paper focuses on "peer-to-peer" human-robot interaction… The underlying assumption is that humans prefer to interact with machines in the same way that they interact with other people Context – Paper’s Scope • Robots with human social characteristics including: dhartman, CS296-3

7. Methodology – Design Issues • Natural human-robot interaction • manifest believable behavior, establish appropriate social expectations • Real-time performance • Must operate at human interaction rates • Readable social cues • Must send signals to the human to provide social feedback. dhartman, CS296-3

8. “That which establishes a basis for structural coupling by creating the potential for mutual perturbation between system and environment" - Authors’ definition Methodology – Embodiment dhartman, CS296-3

9. Methodology - Embodiment • Morphology • Appearance biases interaction (e.g. a robot dog will be treated differently than an anthropomorphic robot) • Design Considerations • Needs enough humanness for user comfort • Needs enough robot-ness to prevent false expectations of the robot's capabilities dhartman, CS296-3

10. Methodology - Embodiment • Anthropomorphic • Many argue that to interact socially with people a robot should resemble a human • Caricatured • Realism is not necessarily needed for believability. • Functional • The embodiment should reflect the tasks it must perform. • Zoomorphic • Most common are "pet" type robots • Human-creature relationships are simpler than human-human relationships • Easier to avoid the "uncanny valley“ in previous slide dhartman, CS296-3

11. Methodology – Human-Oriented Perception • To interact with humans in the real world, social robots must perceive the world the same way that humans do • In particular, they must be able to track human features and interpret human communication • Similar perception may require similar sensing dhartman, CS296-3

12. Methodology – Human-Oriented Perception • Each of these tasks is mentioned and references papers for in depth work. • People Tracking • Speech Recognition • Gesture Recognition • Facial Perception dhartman, CS296-3

13. Dialogue Personality Emotion User Modeling Socially Situated Learning Intentionality Topics That I Am Skipping for Time and Relevance dhartman, CS296-3

14. Discussion – Attitudes Towards Robots • Khan describes a survey to investigate people’s attitudes towards intelligent service robots. Two significant findings were: • A robot with machine-like appearance, serious personality, and round shape is preferred • Verbal communication using a human-like voice is highly desired. dhartman, CS296-3

15. Discussion – Field Studies • Scheeff et al. conducted two studies to observe how a range of people interact with a creature-like social robot. • Children were observed to be more engaged than adults. • A friendly robot personality was reported to have prompted qualitatively better interactionthan an angry personality. dhartman, CS296-3

16. Discussion – One Last Point for Perspective • Paraphrasing Wood,the authors say: • “Humans and robots must be able to coordinate their actions so that they interact productively with each other. It is not appropriate (or even necessary) to make the robot as socially competent as possible. Rather, it is more important that the robot be compatible with the human’s needs, that it matches application requirements; that it be understandable and believable, and that it provide the interactional support the human expects. dhartman, CS296-3