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A fundamental aspect of many human-robot collaborative tasks is object exchange or handover. Several techniques have been proposed to decide when a robot hand or gripper should release an object for a human to receive. However, these techniques typically neglect the reliability of the handover, assuming the process will occur without issue. Based on the fact that humans apply pulling forces in specific...
We present a set of mini-map alternatives for indicating the relative locations of robot team members in a tele-operation interface, and evaluation results showing that these can perform as well as mini-maps while being less intrusive. Teleoperation operators often work with a team of robots to improve task effectiveness. Maintaining awareness of where robot team members are, relative to oneself,...
Mutual synchronization plays a decisive role in effective collaborations in human joint tasks. Interaction between humans and robots need to show similar emergent coordination. To this aim models of human synchronization have recently been ported on collaborative robots with success [1]. However, it is also important to consider under which conditions the human partner is willing to adapt to the robot...
In many future social interactions between robots and humans, robots may need to convince people to change their behavior. People may dislike and resist such persuasive attempts, a phenomenon known as psychological reactance. This paper examines how reactance, measured in terms of negative cognitions and feelings of anger, is affected by the persuading agent's social agency cues and the level of controlling...
In an ageing society, we expect that a robotic caregiver is able to persuade the elderly to perform a healthier behavior. In this work, pragmatic argument is adopted to make the elderly realize that a choice beneficial for health is really worthwhile, such as eating suitable fruits. Based on this concept, an adaptive recommendation dialogue system through pragmatic argumentation is proposed. There...
This work reports research and development of a lightweight neuroprosthesis, which can control the impaired motion by using voluntary biological signal. The total weight of the upper limb neuroprosthesis is 900 g, which is 40% lesser than the commercially available ones. For a trans-humeral amputee who had targeted muscle reinnervation (TMR) surgery, pattern classification of five motions was possible...
Based on a user study, we start from the observation that ‘long turns’ uttered by users towards an assistive system constitute a challenge for the dialog management of a voice-operated system. Assuming an interactional perspective, we address the question as to how ‘long turns’ emerge in interaction. We suggest to conceive of these utterances as being co-constructed by both, the user and the multimodal...
We present a novel approach to enable a mobile service robot to understand questions about the history of tasks it has executed. We frame the problem of understanding such questions as grounding an input sentence to a query that can be executed on the logs recorded by the robot during its runs. We define a query as an operation followed by a set of filters. In order to ground sentence to a query we...
We study the problem of handling the inter-turn pauses in a human-robot dialogue. In order to reduce the impression of elapsed time while the robot transcribes, understands and starts uttering a response we propose to automatically generate conversational fillers, to fill the silences. These fillers combine verbal utterances with body movements. We propose a Bayesian model that samples filler whose...
Many studies suggest that individuals are not able to build a sense of we-agency during joint actions with automated artificial systems. We sought to examine whether or not this lack of sense of control was linked with individuals' inability to represent automaton-generated action into their own cognitive system. Indeed, during human interactions, we automatically represent our partner's actions in...
This paper proposes a framework for an Agent Auto-Generation System (AAGS) which gets information from sensor devices and improvises a conversational agent from arbitrary things. AAGS has agent-types to prepare a perception for an improvised agent according to the shape of the agentization targets. It also has virtual-input, which generates knowledge representation related to information extracted...
The authors propose a new telepresence robot that merges the behaviors of two users and realizes behavior synchrony automatically. Our telepresence robot synchronizes facial expressions, gaze, face orientation, and neck inclination to its client users. The robot exhibited behavior synchrony that gave the client user a feeling that he/she got consent from the remote user. We investigated how behavior...
Creating a standard for knowledge representation and reasoning in autonomous robotics is an urgent task if we consider recent advances in robotics as well as predictions about the insertion of robots in human daily life. Indeed, this will impact the way information is exchanged between multiple robots or between robots and humans and how they can all understand it without ambiguity. Indeed, Human...
Our research goal was to develop a robot counseling system. It is important for a counselor to promote self-disclosure of clients to reduce their anxiety feelings. However, when a counselor is human, clients sometimes hesitate to disclose intrusive topics due to embarrassment and self-esteem issues. We hypothesized that a robot counselor, on account of its unique kind of agency, could remove mental...
We present the results of an elicitation study exploring gestures that novice users find intuitive for controlling a group of four Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Particularly, we focus on group commands for (1) spatial distribution of the operated UAVs, (2) selection of the required UAV(s), and (3) their formation control. To elicit user-defined gestures, we conducted interview sessions in which...
Due to the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, discussions are progressing on how robots could replace human labor. Conventional surveys have suggested that human labor is expected to gradually be replaced as tasks become automated. We conducted a survey at the world's first robot hotel recently opened in Japan — called a Henn-na hotel (“strange/change hotel”) in Japanese — which already...
We investigate how the use of metaphors supports the intuitiveness of gesture input vocabularies for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. We compare gesture sets constituting a single metaphor to gesture sets that are based on mixed metaphors in terms of their respective intuitiveness. To this end, we implemented a 3D simulator in order to check how well novice users steer a UAV without knowing...
The lack of sensory feedback in lower-limb amputees is the major cause of (i) amputees difficulty to keep balance, (ii) suboptimal performance in gait functions and (iii) increased energy consumption. This also hugely affects their participation in the activities of daily living. Improving postural control functions in people with lower-limb amputation has the aim to enhance their quality of life...
Nowadays, robots are gradually appearing in public spaces such as libraries, train stations, airports and shopping centres. Only a limited percentage of research literature explores robot applications in public spaces. Studying robot applications in the wild is particularly important for designing commercially viable applications able to meet a specific goal. Therefore, in this paper we conduct an...
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