How to build robots that make friends and influence people

Social robots are those endowed with communication channels and abilities that take inspiration from human beings. The scope of such abilities should include those allowing a robot to understand people’s affective states and expressions, intentions, actions, and to interpret them based on contextual information. Childcare robots are an example of robots that could take advantage of the integration of these capabilities. This commentary conducts a technical appraisal of the notion of autonomous childcare robots, focusing on these social perceptive capabilities, reviewing some of the key challenges remaining to be investigated by the research community in this respect.

Journal of Human-Robot Interaction, 2013

The main goal of this article is to describe Bender, a general-purpose social robot with humanrobot interaction capabilities, and to report and analyze its applicability in three different natural environments: (i) home settings, (ii) school classrooms, and (iii) public places. Evaluation of the robot's performance is based on its ability to detect and identify humans in those settings, its ability to express emotions, and its ability to interact naturally with humans. The obtained results, although preliminary, indicate that the robot has great acceptance from expert and non-expert human users alike, and that it is able to interact successfully with humans using human-like interaction mechanisms, such as speech and visual cues (particularly facial information). It is remarkable that the robot even has the potential to teach children in a real classroom setting. Further experiments will be conducted in order to better assess the robot's potential.

Current Robotics Reports, 2021

Purpose of Review: We provide an outlook on the definitions, laboratory research, and applications of social robots, with an aim to understand what makes a robot social-in the eyes of science and the general public. Recent Findings: Social robots demonstrate their potential when deployed within contexts appropriate to their form and functions. Some examples include companions for the elderly and cognitively impaired individuals, robots within educational settings, and as tools to support cognitive and behavioural change interventions. Summary: Science fiction has inspired us to conceive of a future with autonomous robots helping with every aspect of our daily lives, although the robots we are familiar with through film and literature remain a vision of the distant future. While there are still miles to go before robots become a regular feature within our social spaces, rapid progress in social robotics research, aided by the social sciences, is helping to move us closer to this reality.

For effective human-robot interaction, we argue that robots must gain social-cognitive mechanisms that allow them to function naturally and intuitively during social interactions with humans. However, a lack of consensus on social cognitive processes poses a challenge for how to design such mechanisms for artificial cognitive systems. We discuss a recent integrative perspective of social cognition to provide a systematic theoretical underpinning for computational instantiations of these mechanisms. We highlight several commitments of our approach that we refer to as Engineering Human Social Cognition. We then provide a series of recommendations to facilitate the development of the perceptual, motor, and cognitive architecture for this proposed artificial cognitive system in future work. For each recommendation, we highlight their relation to the discussed social-cognitive mechanisms, provide the rationale for these recommendations and potential benefits, and detail examples of associated computational formalisms that could be leveraged to instantiate our recommendations. Overall, the goal of this paper is to outline an interdisciplinary and multi-theoretic approach to facilitate the design of robots that will one day function, and be perceived, as socially interactive and effective teammates.

2012 IEEE RO-MAN: The 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2012

Humans use very sophisticated ways of bodily emotion expression combining facial expressions, sound, gestures and full body posture. Like others, we want to apply these aspects of human communication to ease the interaction between robots and users. In doing so we believe there is a need to consider what abstraction of human social communicative behaviors is appropriate for robots. The study reported in this paper is a pilot study to not offer simulated emotion but to offer an abstracted robot version of emotion expressions and an evaluation to what extent users interpret these robot expressions as the intended emotional states. To this end, we present the mobile, mildly humanized robot Daryl, for which we created six motion sequences that combine human-like, animal-like, and robot-specific social cues. The results of a user study (N=29) show that despite the absence of facial expressions and articulated extremities, subjects' interpretation of Daryl's emotional states were congruent with the abstracted emotion display. These results demonstrate that abstract displays of emotion that combine human-like, animal-like, and robot-specific modalities could in fact be an alternative to complex facial expressions and will feed into ongoing work identifying robot-specific social cues. "A socially interactive robot must send signals to the human in order to: (1) provide feedback of its internal state; (2) allow humans to interact in a facile, transparent manner." Many robots that operate in human inhabited environments do not possess sophisticated facial or gestural feature capabilities. This may be due to technical

IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, 2017

Humans show a great natural ability at interacting with each other. Such efficiency in joint actions depends on a synergy between planned collaboration and emergent coordination, a subconscious mechanism based on a tight link between action execution and perception. This link supports phenomena as mutual adaptation, synchronization, and anticipation, which cut drastically the delays in the interaction and the need of complex verbal instructions and result in the establishment of joint intentions, the backbone of social interaction. From a neurophysiological perspective, this is possible, because the same neural system supporting action execution is responsible of the understanding and the anticipation of the observed action of others. Defining which human motion features allow for such emergent coordination with another agent would be crucial to establish more natural and efficient interaction paradigms with artificial devices, ranging from assistive and rehabilitative technology to companion robots. However, investigating the behavioral and neural mechanisms supporting natural interaction poses substantial problems. In particular, the unconscious processes at the basis of emergent coordination (e.g., unintentional movements or gazing) are very difficult-if not impossible-to restrain or control in a quantitative way for a human agent. Moreover, during an interaction, participants influence each other continuously in a complex way, resulting in behaviors that go beyond experimental control. In this paper, we propose robotics technology as a potential solution to this methodological problem. Robots indeed can establish an interaction with a human partner, contingently reacting to his actions without losing the controllability of the experiment or the naturalness of the interactive scenario. A robot could represent an "interactive probe" to assess the sensory and motor mechanisms underlying human-human interaction. We discuss this proposal with examples from our research with the humanoid robot iCub, showing how an interactive humanoid robot could be a key tool to serve the investigation of the psychological and neuroscientific bases of social interaction.

Proceedings of the 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference, 2018

Social robots are robots interacting with humans not only in collaborative settings, but also in personal settings like domestic services and healthcare. Some social robots simulate feelings (companions) while others just help lifting (assistants). However, they often incite both fascination and fear: what abilities should social robots have and what should remain exclusive to humans? We provide a historical background on the development of robots and related machines (1), discuss examples of social robots (2) and present an expert study on their desired future abilities and applications (3) conducted within the Forum of the European Active and Assisted Living Programme (AAL). The findings indicate that most technologies required for the social robots' emotion sensing are considered ready. For care robots, the experts approve health-related tasks like drawing blood while they prefer humans to do nursing tasks like washing. On a larger societal scale, the acceptance of social robots increases highly significantly with familiarity, making health robots and even military drones more acceptable than sex robots or child companion robots for childless couples. Accordingly, the acceptance of social robots seems to decrease with the level of face-to-face emotions involved. • Human-centered computing~Empirical studies in HCI • Human-centered computing~Collaborative and social computing devices • Human-centered computing~User studies • Human-centered computing~Empirical studies in interaction design • Human-centered computing~Accessibility theory, concepts and paradigms • Human-centered computing~Accessibility systems and tools • Social and professional topics~History of hardware • Social and professional topics~Codes of ethics • Social and professional topics~Assistive technologies • Computing methodologies~Cognitive robotics • Computing methodologies~Robotic planning • Applied computing~Consumer health

2005

The Problem: If a robot is intended to interact with people, it needs an active vision system that can serve both a perceptual and communicative function.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2012

Robots are pervading human society today at an ever-accelerating rate, but in order to actualize their profound potential impact, robots will need cognitive capabilities that support the necessary social intelligence required to fluently engage with people and other robots. People are social agents and robots must develop sufficient social intelligence to engage with them effectively. Despite their enormous potential, robots will not be accepted in society unless they exhibit social intelligence skills. They cannot work with people effectively if they ignore the limitations, needs, expectations and vulnerability of people working in and around their workspaces. People are limited social agents, i.e. they do not have unlimited cognitive, computational and physical capabilities like perception, paying attention, reacting to stimuli, anticipation, problem-solving. In addition, people are constrained by their morphology; it limits their physical strength for example. People cannot be expected to and will not compensate for social deficiencies of robots, hence widespread acceptance and integration of robots into society will only be achieved if robots possess the sufficient social intelligence to communicate, interact and collaborate with people. In this paper we identify the key cognitive capabilities robots will require to achieve appropriate levels of social intelligence for safe and effective engagement with people. This work serves as a proto-blueprint that can inform the emerging roadmap and research agenda for the new exciting and challenging field of social robotics.