International Journal of Social Robotics最新文献

{"title":"Exploring the Role of Sociability, Ownership, and Affinity for Technology in Shaping Acceptance and Intention to Use Personal Assistance Robots.","authors":"Eileen Roesler, Sophie Rudolph, Felix Wilhelm Siebert","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01098-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01098-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Personal assistance robots are making inroads into our private and public life. At the same time, most humans are still unfamiliar with this technology and hesitate to accept and use it for daily tasks. Fortunately, the designs of robots can be adjusted to yield greater acceptance, subsequently enabling their utilization across various tasks. Using a scenario-based online experiment, we explored how sociability (low vs. high), ownership (private vs. public), and affinity for technology influence the acceptance and intention to use a robot for grocery shopping. Moreover, to assess users’ preference for robots’ morphology, participants were asked to choose a robot (technical vs. anthropomorphic design) that they would prefer to use in a supermarket. We found that low sociability of the service robot and a higher affective affinity for technology led to a higher level of acceptance. For more sociable robots, higher levels of anthropomorphism were preferred. Our results point to the importance of task-specific robot design that exceeds functional considerations.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"22 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139918623","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Sonic Sleight of Hand: Sound Induces Illusory Distortions in the Perception and Prediction of Robot Action","authors":"Joel Currie, Maria Elena Giannaccini, Patric Bach","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01105-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01105-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p>For efficient human–robot interaction, human operators need to be able to efficiently represent the robot’s movements in space and predict its next steps. However, according to frameworks of Bayesian multisensory integration, features outside the motion itself—like the sounds a robot makes while it moves—should affect how otherwise identical motions are perceived. Here, we translate an established psychophysical task from experimental psychology to a human–robot interaction context, which can measure these distortions to motion perception. In two series of preregistered studies, participants watched a humanoid robot make forward and backward reaching movements. When the robot hand suddenly disappeared, they reported its last seen location, either with the mouse cursor (Experiment 1a and 1b) or by matching it to probe stimuli in different locations (Experiment 2a and 2b). The results revealed that even small changes to the robot’s sound robustly affect participants’ visuospatial representation of its motions, so that the motion appeared to extend further in space when accompanied by slightly (100 ms) longer sounds compared to slightly shorter sounds (100 ms shorter). Moreover, these sound changes do not only affect where people currently locate the robot’s motion, but where they anticipate its future steps. These findings show that sound design is an effective medium for manipulating how people represent otherwise identical robot actions and coordinate its interactions with it. The study acts as proof of concept that psychophysical tasks provide a promising tool to measure how design parameters influence the perception and prediction of robot motion.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"23 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139759425","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Attention Sharing Handling Through Projection Capability Within Human–Robot Collaboration","authors":"Benjamin Camblor, David Daney, Lucas Joseph, Jean-Marc Salotti","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01101-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01101-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The link between situation awareness (SA) and the distribution of human attention, has been explored within a human robot collaboration framework. According to Endsley (1995), SA is divided into three levels: perception, comprehension and projection. It is involved in the process of making decisions and carrying out actions in a dynamic environment. This work investigates three hypotheses. First, that the ability to project a robot’s future actions improves performance in a collaborative task. Second, that the more participants are involved in tasks in a collaborative environment, the better their SA will be. Finally, that the use of a robot’s non-verbal communication motions attracts a participant’s attention more promptly than if the robot remains motionless. A within-participants study has been designed to investigate our three hypotheses. Participants were asked to perform a collaborative task with a robot. It required them to assist the robot at different moments while they were engaged in a distracting task that was catching their attention (tower of Hanoi puzzle). These moments could either be anticipated and taken into account in the human decision-making and action loop or not. Lastly, the robot could either use non-verbal communication gestures to draw human attention or not. The results have demonstrated the significance of considering the human capability to project a robot next actions in their own personal attention management. Moreover, the subjective measures showed no difference in the assessment of SA, in contrast to the objective measures, which are in line with our second hypothesis. Finally, it seems that standing stationary can be considered a gesture of non-verbal communication. In the present work, robot waiting was more salient in capturing human attention when the robot remained motionless rather than making a signaling motion.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"5 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139759422","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"R2C3, A Rehabilitation Robotic Companion for Children and Caregivers: The Collaborative Design of a Social Robot for Children with Neurodevelopmental Disorders","authors":"","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01104-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01104-6","url":null,"abstract":"<h3>Abstract</h3> <p>Neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) are a group of conditions affecting children’s neurodevelopment with consequences on personal, social, and educational functioning. Social robots have been used in the rehabilitation of children with NDD with encouraging results on learning outcomes. This study aims at understanding how a social robot should act to support caregivers during the rehabilitation of children with NDD. Through a Design-Based-Research approach, we investigate this question by considering the point of view of the most concerned and expert people, i.e., children with NDD and their caregivers. We present here the collaborative and iterative design of R2C3, a social robot used to support caregivers and children during rehabilitation sessions in a learning-by-teaching scenario. 27 caregivers and 6 children participated in the iterative design and/or the evaluation of R2C3, that resulted in the development of a Wizard-of-Oz interface and a library containing 120 robot behaviors. We then studied how caregivers used such behaviors during the rehabilitation sessions. We found they mainly used the robot to provide positive reinforcements to children, to elicit their reflection and knowledge toward shared handwriting activities, and to support children’s error acceptance. However, the utilization of Positive Reinforcement by caregivers tends to decrease significantly as the sessions progress.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"27 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139759354","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Analysis of the Application of the Bee-Bot Robot for the Development of Social Reciprocity Skills in Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder","authors":"Elena Pérez-Vázquez, Gonzalo Lorenzo, Alejandro Lorenzo-Lledó, Asunción Lledó","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01099-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01099-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Increasingly, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) are being used as a resource in the teaching–learning process of students with special educational needs. Specifically, the needs of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) seem to align perfectly with ICT, especially with Pedagogical Robotics, as it enables the creation of predictable and controllable environments. For this reason, the main aim of this research has been to apply the Bee-Bot robot to improve the social-emotional reciprocity responses of students with ASD. Therefore, a quantitative research based on a quasi-experimental methodology and a pre-test-post-test design has been developed. The sample of participants was composed by 22 children with ASD. In this sense, the experimental group was composed by 11 students who developed the activities through the mediation of the Bee-Bot robot. While the control group was composed by 11 other students who developed non-robotics mediated activities. An ad hoc instrument consisting of 44 items divided into three dimensions, related to the communication and social interaction area, was used. Each participant participated in ten individual sessions lasting fifteen minutes. The results indicate improvements in the post-test because of the use of robotics as a mediating learning tool. For example, there are improvements in items 1 and 2 related to attention with <i>p</i> values less than 0.05, as well as improvements in items 13, 15 and 16 related to the identification and discrimination of emotions. Furthermore, the results of the intra-group analysis show, on the one hand, significant differences on the part of the control group in item 13, related to emotion identification and discrimination skills. On the other hand, in the case of the experimental group, the number of items in which there are significant differences is greater. Specifically, participants in the experimental group show significant differences in items related to attention, basic social skills, conversational skills and emotion identification skills. In conclusion, the Bee-Bot robot, accompanied by a pedagogical programme, has potential for learning social-emotional reciprocity skills in these students.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-13","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139759355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Folk Beliefs of Artificial Intelligence and Robots","authors":"Liying Xu, Yuyan Zhang, Feng Yu, Xiaojun Ding, Jiahua Wu","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01097-2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01097-2","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Artificial intelligence (AI) and robots have the potential to revolutionize society, with impacts ranging from the broadest reaches of industry and policy to the minutiae of daily life. The extent to which AI-based technologies can bring benefits to human society depends on how people perceive them––folk beliefs of AI and robots. The present paper aims to gain insights into people’s perspectives on artificial intelligence and robots by examining their folk beliefs. In Study 1, we explored folk beliefs regarding general artificial intelligence and robots using metaphor nomination (Phase 1, <i>N</i> = 99), factor analysis (Phase 2, <i>N</i> = 267), and semantic analysis (Phase 3). Results indicated three primary folk beliefs for AI: the unknown, the assistants, and the machines. For robots, three primary folk beliefs emerged: the assistants, the companions, and the tools. In Study 2, we investigated folk beliefs about robots in various application contexts through free listing (Phase 1, <i>N</i> = 82) and factor analysis (Phase 2, <i>N</i> = 300). Results revealed four folk beliefs for companion robots: companion ability, applicable target, social consequence, and technology. Additionally, four folk beliefs emerged for education robots: educational ability, advantage, disadvantage, and technology, while medical robots were associated with five folk beliefs: medical ability, advancement, social consequence, disadvantage, and technology. This research is the first step in examining how ordinary people conceptualize artificial intelligence and robots through folk theories, unveiling several directions for future research reference. Our findings also revealed that lay people’s perceptions of artificial intelligence and robots are shaped by social cognitive processes. This also implies that the methods of folk theories can be utilized to investigate people’s social cognitive processes. The current study carries practical significance for the designers and manufacturers of AI and robots, guiding aspects such as the professional capabilities of artificial intelligence and robots, potential negative social consequences, and the needs of specific user groups.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"16 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139759353","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"How do Robot Touch Characteristics Impact Users’ Emotional Responses: Evidence from ECG and fNIRS","authors":"Fu Guo, Chen Fang, Mingming Li, Zenggen Ren, Zeyu Zhang","doi":"10.1007/s12369-024-01110-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-024-01110-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Robot touch is a vital interaction mode for emotional communication and human mental support in HRI. However, little is known about how robot touch characteristics influence the users’ subjective perception of emotion and physiological reactions. Therefore, a within-subject experiment of robot touches was conducted with the touch type (contact versus grip), length (long versus short), and location (hand versus forearm) as independent variables. The subjective perception was measured with PANAS scales. Electrocardiography (ECG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) were utilized to measure the participant’s cardiac autonomic nervous system responses and cerebral central nervous system responses. Results showed that touch type and length jointly affected users’ subjective perception of emotion and cerebral activity, and location affected users’ heart rate variability and cerebral activity. The results suggest that robot short-grip and long-contact behaviors might bring users more positive emotions. Although robot touch on forearms might not induce more positive emotional perception, it might be helpful for emotional regulation and might mobilize more cognitive resources.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-02-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139664255","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Analysis and Perspectives on the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Competition","authors":"Kris Hauser, Eleanor ‘Nell’ Watson, Joonbum Bae, Josh Bankston, Sven Behnke, Bill Borgia, Manuel G. Catalano, Stefano Dafarra, Jan B. F. van Erp, Thomas Ferris, Jeremy Fishel, Guy Hoffman, Serena Ivaldi, Fumio Kanehiro, Abderrahmane Kheddar, Gaëlle Lannuzel, Jacquelyn Ford Morie, Patrick Naughton, Steve NGuyen, Paul Oh, Taskin Padir, Jim Pippine, Jaeheung Park, Jean Vaz, Daniele Pucci, Peter Whitney, Peggy Wu, David Locke","doi":"10.1007/s12369-023-01095-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01095-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic “avatar” system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human–machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges’ task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition’s execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.\u0000</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139583443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Cybernetic Avatar System to Embody Human Telepresence for Connectivity, Exploration, and Skill Transfer","authors":"Rafael Cisneros-Limón, Antonin Dallard, Mehdi Benallegue, Kenji Kaneko, Hiroshi Kaminaga, Pierre Gergondet, Arnaud Tanguy, Rohan Pratap Singh, Leyuan Sun, Yang Chen, Carole Fournier, Guillaume Lorthioir, Masato Tsuru, Sélim Chefchaouni-Moussaoui, Yukiko Osawa, Guillaume Caron, Kevin Chappellet, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Adrien Escande, Ko Ayusawa, Younes Houhou, Iori Kumagai, Michio Ono, Koji Shirasaka, Shiryu Wada, Hiroshi Wada, Fumio Kanehiro, Abderrahmane Kheddar","doi":"10.1007/s12369-023-01096-9","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01096-9","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper describes the cybernetic avatar system developed by Team JANUS for connectivity, exploration, and skill transfer: the core domains targeted by the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition, for which Team JANUS was a finalist. We used as an avatar a humanoid robot with a human-like appearance and shape that is capable of reproducing facial expressions and walking, and built an avatar control system that allowed the operator to control the avatar through equivalent mechanisms of motion; that is, by replicating the upper-body movement with naturalness and by stepping to command locomotion. In this way, we aimed to achieve high-fidelity telepresence and managed to be well evaluated from the point of view of the operator during the competition. We introduce our solutions to the integration challenges and present experimental results to asses our avatar system, together with current limitations and how we are planning to mitigate them in future work.</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"8 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139583713","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Practical Approaches Towards Transparent and Stable Bilateral Teleoperation Under Time-Varying Network Delay","authors":"Chunpeng Wang, Rui Luo, John Peter Whitney, Taskin Padir","doi":"10.1007/s12369-023-01092-z","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-023-01092-z","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In real-life teleoperation scenarios, the presence of time-varying network delays, particularly in wireless networks, poses significant challenges in maintaining stability in a bilateral teleoperation system. Various approaches have been proposed in the past to address stability concerns; however, these often come at the expense of system transparency. Nevertheless, increasing transparency is crucial in a teleoperation system to enable precise and safe operations, as well as to provide real-time decision-making capabilities for the operator. This paper presents our comprehensive approaches to maximize teleoperation transparency by minimizing system impedance, enhance the wave variable method to handle time-varying network delays, and alleviate non-smooth effects caused by network jitters in bilateral teleoperation. The proposed methodologies take into account the real-world challenges and considerations to ensure the practical applicability and effectiveness of the teleoperation system. Throughout these implementations, passivity analysis is employed to ensure system stability, guaranteeing a reliable and safe teleoperation experience. The proposed approaches were successfully validated in Team Northeastern’s Avatar telepresence system, which achieved the 3rd place in ANA Avatar XPRIZE challenge.\u0000</p>","PeriodicalId":14361,"journal":{"name":"International Journal of Social Robotics","volume":"2 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":4.7,"publicationDate":"2024-01-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139516872","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"计算机科学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}