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A Survey of Socially Interactive Robots

Terrance Fong, Illah Nourbakhsh, Kerstin Dautenhahn

Presentation by Dan Hartmann

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Context - History The first work in social robotics involved

stigmergy as a model for behavior in insect colonies

Stigmergy was described to explain how social insect societies produce complex behavior patterns, from individuals performing simple ones.

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Context - Societies Insect societies are

anonymous, homogenous groups.

Many animals form individual societies, where each member forms relationships and social networks

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Context – Breazeal’s Four Classes of Social Robots

Socially Evocative Relies on the human

tendency to anthropomorphize

Social Interface Provides a natural

interface by employing human-like social cues

Socially Receptive Socially Passive but

benefits from interaction e.g. learning from

demonstration

Sociable Pro-actively engages

with humans to satisfy internal social aims

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Context – Three More Suggested Classes

Socially Intelligent Show aspects of human style social intelligence, based on

deep models of human cognition.

Socially Situated Surrounded by a social

environment, they must be able to distinguish between social agents and other objects.

Socially Embedded Physically connected to a

social environment requiring at least rudimentary social concepts, such as taking turns.

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Context – Paper’s Scope This paper focuses on

"peer-to-peer" human-robot interaction…

The underlying assumption is that humans prefer to interact with machines in the same way that they interact with other people

Robots with human social characteristics including:

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Methodology – Design Issues Natural human-robot

interaction manifest believable

behavior, establish appropriate social expectations

Real-time performance Must operate at human

interaction rates

Readable social cues Must send signals to the

human to provide social feedback.

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Methodology – Embodiment

“That which establishes a basis for structural coupling by creating the potential for mutual perturbation between system and environment"

- Authors’ definition

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Methodology - Embodiment Morphology

Appearance biases interaction (e.g. a robot dog will be treated differently than an anthropomorphic robot)

Design Considerations Needs enough humanness

for user comfort Needs enough robot-ness to

prevent false expectations of the robot's capabilities

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Methodology - Embodiment

Anthropomorphic Many argue that to interact

socially with people a robot should resemble a human

Caricatured Realism is not necessarily

needed for believability.

Functional The embodiment should reflect

the tasks it must perform.

Zoomorphic Most common are "pet"

type robots Human-creature

relationships are simpler than human-human relationships

Easier to avoid the "uncanny valley“ in previous slide

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Methodology – Human-Oriented Perception

To interact with humans in the real world, social robots must perceive the world the same way that humans do

In particular, they must be able to track human features and interpret human communication

Similar perception may require similar sensing

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Methodology – Human-Oriented Perception

Each of these tasks is mentioned and references papers for in depth work. People Tracking Speech Recognition Gesture Recognition Facial Perception

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Topics That I Am Skipping for Time and Relevance

Dialogue Personality Emotion

User Modeling Socially Situated

Learning Intentionality

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Discussion – Attitudes Towards Robots

Khan describes a survey to investigate people’s attitudes towards intelligent service robots. Two significant findings were: A robot with machine-like appearance, serious

personality, and round shape is preferred Verbal communication using a human-like voice

is highly desired.

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Discussion – Field Studies Scheeff et al. conducted two studies to

observe how a range of people interact with a creature-like social robot. Children were observed to be more engaged

than adults. A friendly robot personality was reported to have

prompted qualitatively better interactionthan an angry personality.

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Discussion – One Last Point for Perspective

Paraphrasing Wood,the authors say: “Humans and robots must be able to coordinate their

actions so that they interact productively with each other. It is not appropriate (or even necessary) to make the robot as socially competent as possible. Rather, it is more important that the robot be compatible with the human’s needs, that it matches application requirements; that it be understandable and believable, and that it provide the interactional support the human expects.