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The purpose of this paper is to comprehend which kinds of robot faces are suited to the specific tasks that these robots are good at. Specifically, we focused on 64 design elements of robot faces; two different sizes and two different positions of the eyes, ears, and mouth, and we then conducted a questionnaire based investigation to clarify the relationship between these elements and five different...
Conference proceedings front matter may contain various advertisements, welcome messages, committee or program information, and other miscellaneous conference information. This may in some cases also include the cover art, table of contents, copyright statements, title-page or half title-pages, blank pages, venue maps or other general information relating to the conference that was part of the original...
In multi-participant conversation, speaker and listener pay attention to all participants to carry out smooth turn-taking. However, in video conversation it is difficult to perceive the timing of when to take turns talking because participants cannot perceive each other's eye-gaze. Consequently, one participant often misses the sign of when another person wants to speak, and continues to speak longer...
Natural language user interfaces, such as Apple Siri and Google Voice Search have been embedded in consumer devices; however, speaking to objects can feel awkward. Use of these interfaces should feel natural, like speaking to a real listener. This paper proposes a method for manufactured objects such as anime figures to exhibit highly realistic behavioral expressions to improve speech interaction...
A preliminary experiment is carried out to investigate the effects of LED light animations on a user's perception of a computer. As anthropomorphism has become an important factor in interaction design, current research tends to add human-like expression abilities to interactive devices. Such methods, however, have limitations as they are complex and not applicable to many currently-in-use appearance-constrained...
We conducted three experiments to discover the effect of a virtual agent's state transition on a user's eye gaze. Many previous studies showed that an agent's state transition affects a user's state. We focused on two kinds of transitions, the internal state transition and appearance state transition. In this research, we used a product recommendation virtual agent (PRVA) and aimed to discover the...
Generation gap can make communication difficult, even within a family. Each family member has a preferred style of communication. To address this, we proposed a shared-agent system for encouraging remote communication between family members. This paper reports the results of a pilot study, in which a prototype robot interface was evaluated, and the acceptance of asynchronous communication by elderly...
Puffy is a learning and playful robotic companion for pre-school children. Designed in cooperation with a team of educators and inspired by Disney's Baymax, Puffy has a combination of features which makes it unique with respect to existing robots used in educational contexts. It is mobile and has an egg-shaped inflatable and soft body; it supports multimodal interaction, reacting to children's gestures...
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...
Allowing humans to teach robot behaviors will facilitate acceptability as well as long-term interactions. Humans would mainly use speech to transfer knowledge or to teach highlevel behaviors. In this paper, we propose a proof-of-concept application allowing a Pepper robot to learn behaviors from their natural-language-based description, provided by naive human users. In our model, natural language...
Research in HRI indicates that people follow a robot's instructions even when they are incorrect. However, when a robot's instructions or requests contradict those of a human (e.g. an authoritative experimenter), people obey the human instead. This might be due to the experimenter's perceived ingroup status, or to their higher presumed authority compared to the robot. This study manipulated experimenter...
Execution of cognitive stimulation interventions for cognitive training of individuals in need represents significant burden on caregivers in time and labor costs. Recent advancements in Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) research can be exploited to reduce caregivers burden by work sharing with robots and supplementing/complementing human resources in execution of interventions. Current research evaluates...
The paper discusses the assessment of humanrobot interaction (HRI) experiments in social robotics. Some of the MOnarCH project experiments are analyzed, illustrating key ideas on performance indicators based in activation rates of micro-behaviors and environment models. The consistency of the results obtained indicates that the ideas are fully applicable to other experiments in social robotics.
One important function in assistive robotics for home applications is the detection of emergency cases, like falls. In this paper, we present a new detection system which can run on a mobile robot to detect persons after a fall event robustly. The system is based on 3D Normal Distributions Transform (NDT) maps on which a powerful segmentation is applied. Segments most likely belonging to a person...
We propose herein a method to predict the sit-to-stand movement before a user leaves their seat. The proposed method is evaluated by using it for sit-to-stand and noisy movements, and the sit-to-stand movement is predicted with an average accuracy of 99.5%. Furthermore, based on this proposed method, we develop a prototype system to assist the sit-to-stand movement. To verify the effectiveness of...
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...
Electroencephalography signals can be used to detect start and stop times of gait. This is useful for people who have lost or present serial low limb motor difficulties in order to work in conjunction with an exoskeleton. Normally, the frequency bands that are used to detect the gait or stop intentions are related to mu and beta frequency bands. However, in order to enhance the electroencephalography...
For a robotic walker designed to assist mobility constrained people, it is important to take into account the different spectrum of pathological walking patterns, which result into completely different needs to be covered for each specific user. For a deployable intelligent assistant robot it is necessary to have a precise gait analysis system, providing real-time monitoring of the user and extracting...
In this paper we propose a gait pattern analysis system that uses stereo vision and machine learning techniques for robotic walker applications. This work contributes with a user monitoring system, that allows the development of more user-centered approaches, such as safer and adaptive HMIs. It also provides a tool to help healthcare personnel in medical assessments. The gait analysis system presented...
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