How Do You Like Me in This: User Embodiment Preferences for Companion Agents

Segura, Elena Márquez; Kriegel, Michael; Aylett, Ruth; Deshmukh, Amol; Cramer, Henriette

doi:10.1007/978-3-642-33197-8_12

Cited by 20 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 20 publications

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“…This also follows for simulated work, for example, that people may prefer to interact with [22,30] or play a game with a real robot instead of a simulated one [20]. Much of this may simply be the novelty factor of robots, where people enjoy or prefer interacting with new and exciting technologies such as robots.…”

Section: Related Work and Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 90%

Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot?

Seo

Geiskkovitch

Nakane

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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In designing and evaluating human-robot interactions and interfaces, researchers often use a simulated robot due to the high cost of robots and time required to program them. However, it is important to consider how interaction with a simulated robot differs from a real robot; that is, do simulated robots provide authentic interaction? We contribute to a growing body of work that explores this question and maps out simulated-versus-real differences, by explicitly investigating empathy: how people empathize with a physical or simulated robot when something bad happens to it. Our results suggest that people may empathize more with a physical robot than a simulated one, a finding that has important implications on the generalizability and applicability of simulated HRI work. Empathy is particularly relevant to social HRI and is integral to, for example, companion and care robots. Our contribution additionally includes an original and reproducible HRI experimental design to induce empathy toward robots in laboratory settings, and an experimentally validated empathy-measuring instrument from psychology for use with HRI.

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Section: Related Work and Backgroundmentioning

confidence: 90%

Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot?

Seo

Geiskkovitch

Nakane

et al. 2015

Proceedings of the Tenth Annual ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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show abstract

“…Since this is not at present an uncontroversial assertion, we first briefly consider and justify the role of robot embodiment itself. A range of efforts have focused on the use of simulated or virtual agents and avatars, in addition to physically embodied robotic devices, with some efforts to combine the two (Segura, Kriegel, Aylett, Deshmukh, & Cramer, 2012). In addition to the clear advantage that physical robots have in terms of real world interaction and manipulation (Stiehl et al, 2009;Shibata, 2011), regarding the difference between the embodiment types, there are three aspects that indicate some (potential) advantage is conferred by the presence of a physical robot.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users

Coninx

Baxter

Oleari³

et al. 2015

Journal of Human-Robot Interaction

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Social robots have the potential to provide support in a number of practical domains, such as learning and behaviour change. This potential is particularly relevant for children, who have proven receptive to interactions with social robots. To reach learning and therapeutic goals, a number of issues need to be investigated, notably the design of an effective child-robot interaction (cHRI) to ensure the child remains engaged in the relationship and that educational goals are met. Typically, current cHRI research experiments focus on a single type of interaction activity (e.g. a game). However, these can suffer from a lack of adaptation to the child, or from an increasingly repetitive nature of the activity and interaction. In this paper, we motivate and propose a practicable solution to this issue: an adaptive robot able to switch between multiple activities within single interactions. We describe a system that embodies this idea, and present a case study in which diabetic children collaboratively learn with the robot about various aspects of managing their condition. We demonstrate the ability of our system to induce a varied interaction and show the potential of this approach both as an educational tool and as a research method for long-term cHRI.

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“…Also, higher degrees of freedom in the robot's movement led participants to report the robot was more indicative during the interaction, in which the participants explained the use of household objects to the robot (Fischer et al, 2012). Segura et al (2012) found that people preferred to interact with a robotic agent than a virtual agent because of the robot's physicality, but their overall perceptions of the surrogates were not different-they concluded that the users focused more on the surrogate's behaviors in the task-based context. Rodriguez-Lizundia et al used an interactive bellboy robot to evaluate engagement and comfort with different robot designs and behaviors.…”

Section: Physicality and Gesturingmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Large-Scale Study of Surrogate Physicality and Gesturing on Human–Surrogate Interactions in a Public Space

et al. 2017

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Technological human surrogates, including robotic and virtual humans, have been popularly used in various scenarios, including training, education, and entertainment. Prior research has investigated the effects of the surrogate's physicality and gesturing in human perceptions and social influence of the surrogate. However, those studies have been carried out in research laboratories, where the participants were aware that it was an experiment, and the participant demographics are typically relatively narrowe.g., college students. In this paper, we describe and share results from a large-scale exploratory user study involving 7,685 people in a public space, where they were unaware of the experimental nature of the setting, to investigate the effects of surrogate physicality and gesturing on their behavior during human-surrogate interactions. We evaluate human behaviors using several variables, such as proactivity and reactivity, and proximity. We have identified several interesting phenomena that could lead to hypotheses developed as part of future hypothesis-based studies. Based on the measurements of the variables, we believe people are more likely to be engaged in a human-surrogate interaction when the surrogate is physically present, but movements and gesturing with its body parts have not shown the expected benefits for the interaction engagement. Regarding the demographics of the people in the study, we found higher overall engagement for females than males, and higher reactivity for younger than older people. We discuss implications for practitioners aiming to design a technological surrogate that will directly interact with real humans.

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How Do You Like Me in This: User Embodiment Preferences for Companion Agents

Cited by 20 publications

References 20 publications

Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot?

Poor Thing! Would You Feel Sorry for a Simulated Robot?

Towards Long-Term Social Child-Robot Interaction: Using Multi-Activity Switching to Engage Young Users

A Large-Scale Study of Surrogate Physicality and Gesturing on Human–Surrogate Interactions in a Public Space

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