Face the Music and Glance

Abstract

It is our hypothesis that improvised musical interaction will be able to provide the extended engagement often failing others during long term Human Robot Interaction (HRI) trials. Our previous work found that simply framing sessions with their drumming robot Mortimer as social interactions increased both social presence and engagement, two factors we feel are crucial to developing and maintaining a positive and meaningful relationship between human and robot. For this study we investigate the inclusion of the additional social modalities, namely head pose and facial expression, as nonverbal behaviour has been shown to be an important conveyor of information in both social and musical contexts. Following a 6 week experimental study using automatic behavioural metrics, results demonstrate those subjected to nonverbal behaviours not only spent more time voluntarily with the robot, but actually increased the time they spent as the trial progressed. Further, that they interrupted the robot less during social interactions and played for longer uninterrupted. Conversely, they also looked at the robot less in both musical and social contexts. We take these results as support for open ended musical activity providing a solid grounding for human robot relationships and the improvement of this by the inclusion of appropriate nonverbal behaviours.

Designerly Ways of Knowing in HRI

“…To be acknowledged as meaningful contributions, the following detailed descriptions were expected: the process followed, the materials and resources employed, the methods used for evaluation, and a demonstration of the promise offered by the design. These contributions focused on novel robot designs and studies on design features, for example, such as facilitating people's understanding of robot intentions, as in the work of Szafir et al [20], or studying behaviors and expressivity for achieving sustained human-robot engagement, as in the research with the robot Mortimer [21]. It can be argued, however, that these examples are not uniquely "designerly," as they present the development and evaluation of a standalone and unique robotic solution.…”