SOCIAL ROBOTICS: Reality and Virtuality in Agent-Based Robotics

2020

Social Robotics poses tough challenges to software designers who are required to take care of difficult architectural drivers like acceptability, trust of robots as well as to guarantee that robots establish a personalised interaction with their users. Moreover, in this context recurrent software design issues such as ensuring interoperability, improving reusability and customizability of software components also arise. Designing and implementing social robotic software architectures is a time-intensive activity requiring multi-disciplinary expertise: this makes difficult to rapidly develop, customise, and personalise robotic solutions. These challenges may be mitigated at design time by choosing certain architectural styles, implementing specific architectural patterns and using particular technologies. Leveraging on our experience in the MARIO project, in this paper we propose a series of principles that social robots may benefit from. These principles lay also the foundations for...

2005

Abstract This paper details the Social Robot Architecture, a framework for explicit human-robot and robot-robot social interaction. The core mechanisms for realizing a robust robot control architecture involving a synthesis of reactive, deliberative, and social reasoning mechanisms are presented and discussed. In addition, the Virtual Robotic Workbench is briefly described which demonstrates the coherent integration of both physical and virtual social robots in the human social space.

Lecture notes in networks and systems, 2022

Social robotics research requires the replicability of the experiments used to validate new technical or scientific claims. However, humans behavior is difficult to replicate. We have designed and implemented a system to simulate interactive agents that can be perceived by a robot in a robotic simulator. These agents can exhibit social behaviour in human group movement, for example, by talking in pairs. These humans are interactive with the robot and can be perceived so that the robot can react to their behavior. The humans can be choreographed to create high-level social behaviours such as waiting for an elevator, getting in and out of it, or standing in front of a store window and moving together to the next one. The tool would provide metrics to evaluate the robot's performance in defined social situations.

Endowing robots with a social interface is often costly and difficult. Virtual characters on the other hand are comparatively cheap and well equipped but suffer from other difficulties, most notably their inability to interact with the physical world. This paper details our wearable solution to combining physical robots and virtual characters into a Mixed Reality Agent (MiRA) through mixed reality visualisation. It describes a pilot study demonstrating our system, and showing how such a technique can offer a viable alternative cost effective approach to enabling a rich social interface for Hu-man-Robot Interaction.

The Knowledge Engineering Review, 2008

The simulation of synthetic humans inhabiting virtual environments is a current research topic with a great number of behavioral problems to be tackled. Semantical Virtual Environments (SVEs) have recently been proposed not only to ease world modelling but also to enhance agent-object and agent-agent interaction. Thus, we propose the use of ontologies to define the world's knowledge base and to introduce semantic levels of detail that help the sensorization of complex scenes -containing lots of interactive objects. The object taxonomy also helps to create general and reusable operativity for autonomous characters -for example, liquids can be poured from containers such as bottles. On the other hand, we use the ontology to define social relations among agents within an artificial society. These relations must be taken into account in order to display socially acceptable decisions. Therefore, we have implemented a market-based social model that reaches coordination and sociability by means of task exchanges. This paper presents a multi-agent framework oriented to simulate socially intelligent characters in Semantic virtual environments. The framework has been successfully tested in 3D dynamic scenarios while simulating a virtual university bar, where groups of waiters and customers interact with both the objects in the scene and the other virtual agents finally displaying complex social behaviors.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2015

To study how robots can work better with humans as a team, we have designed an agent-based online testbed that supports virtual simulation of domain-independent human-robot interaction. The simulation is implemented as an online game where humans and virtual robots work together in simulated scenarios. This testbed allows researchers to carry out human-robot interaction studies and gain better understanding of, for example, how a robot's communication can improve human-robot team performance by fostering better trust relationships among humans and their robot teammates. In this paper, we discuss the requirements, challenges and the design of such human-robot simulation. We illustrate its operation with an example human-robot joint reconnaissance task.

2000

This paper discusses the concept of a social robot. Developing from recent work on physical embodiment, the necessity for a socially embodied robot is presented. Current work via the Social Robot Architecture seeks to develop and demonstrate these concepts.

1999

Abstract. This paper advocates the application of VRML in the visualisation of social robotic behaviour. We present the Virtual Reality Workbench, which via the Social Robot Architecture integrates the key elements of Virtual Reality and robotics in a coherent and systematic manner. To support this, we deliver a development environment, Agent Factory, which facilitates rapid prototyping and visualisation of social robot communities.

ROMAN 2005. IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2005.

With the recent development of the field of social robotics and in particular the need to negotiate explicit social interaction and behaviour between both socially capable robots and between robots and humans, this work presents the development of a framework which supports coherent social interaction between real and artificial systems. The Social Robot Architecture is implemented in conjunction with the Virtual Robotic Workbench, a cohesive framework which integrates physical robots, virtual robot avatars and humans in a shared social space.

ArXiv, 2021

More than a decade has passed since the development of FearNot!, an application designed to help children deal with bullying through role-playing with virtual characters. It was also the application that led to the creation of FAtiMA, an affective agent architecture for creating autonomous characters that can evoke empathic responses. In this paper, we describe FAtiMA Toolkit, a collection of open-source tools that is designed to help researchers, game developers and roboticists incorporate a computational model of emotion and decision-making in their work. The toolkit was developed with the goal of making FAtiMA more accessible, easier to incorporate into different projects and more flexible in its capabilities for human-agent interaction, based upon the experience gathered over the years across different virtual environments and human-robot interaction scenarios. As a result, this work makes several different contributions to the field of Agent-Based Architectures. More precisely,...