Enthusiastic Robots Make Better Contact

Abstract

This paper presents the design and evaluation of human-like welcoming behaviors for a humanoid robot to draw the attention of passersby by following a three-step model: (1) selecting a target (person) to engage, (2) executing behaviors to draw the target's attention, and (3) monitoring the attentive response. A computer vision algorithm was developed to select the person, start the behaviors and monitor the response automatically. To vary the robot's enthusiasm when engaging passersby, a waving gesture was designed as basic welcoming behavioral element, which could be successively combined with an utterance and an approach movement. This way, three levels of enthusiasm were implemented: Mild (waving), moderate (waving and utterance) and high (waving, utterance and approach movement).The three levels of welcoming behaviors were tested with a Pepper robot at the entrance of a university building. We recorded data and observation sheets from several hundreds of passersby (N = 364) and conducted post-interviews with randomly selected passersby (N = 28). The level selection was done at random for each participant. The passersby indicated that they appreciated the robot at the entrance and clearly recognized its role as a welcoming robot. In addition, the robot proved to draw more attention when showing high enthusiasm (i.e., more welcoming behaviors), particularly for female passersby.

A Survey on Recent Advances in Social Robotics

“…The purpose was to use the most appropriate action among waving, looking toward human, waving, and handshaking Additionally, in the context of social intelligence, a vision-based framework for allowing robots to recognize and respond to hand waving gestures were presented in [16], increasing its social believability. Furthermore, a humanoid robot was endowed with human-like welcoming behaviors with enthusiasm for the purpose of drawing the attention of persons entering a building in [17]. In a related application in terms of constraints, a flyer distributing robot for pedestrians in a shopping mall has been presented in [45].…”

“…Furthermore, social robots can convey information to humans via different means such as speech, gestures, and facial expressions [11]. Advances in machine learning and pattern recognition are allowing robots to acquire realistic social behaviors involving behaviors in speech and gestures [12][13][14][15][16][17]. This enabled robots to be active conversation parties either in text-based or voice-based conversations.…”

Break the Ice: a Survey on Socially Aware Engagement for Human–Robot First Encounters

“…Researchers have done this in many ways. Showing high enthusiasm gestures can be an effective strategy to draw people's attention, as studied by Saad et al [105]. They performed a study with Pepper at a building's entrance with mild (wave), moderate (wave & speech), and high (wave & speech & small approach movement) enthusiasm.…”

Entheos: A Multimodal Dataset for Studying Enthusiasm

“…Multimodal human-machine interaction can be more effective if systems can find a deeper understanding of more complex emotional responses or generate appropriate emotionally-aware communicative presentations. Given the importance of enthusiasm in teaching (Bettencourt et al, 1983;Zhang, 2014), for instance, researchers are studying the effect of virtual agents and robots that can behave in an enthusiastic manner (Liew et al, 2017(Liew et al, , 2020Saad et al, 2019). The current research is far from generating natural enthusiastic behavior.…”