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The Social Robots Project

Vikia: A Robot for Social Interaction

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Different Approaches to Human-Robot Interaction

Non-anthropomorphicEasy to design, but hard to use

AnthropomorphicOpposite problem

Continuum exists between the two

Where is it best to focus our efforts?

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Social Interaction

Focus on the abilities that people use to communicate with each other

Doesn’t require training for users In service domains, social behavior is an

important part of accomplishing the task well (e.g. caretaker, tour guide)

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Goals of Social Robot Project

Vikia - a robotic greeter / tour guide for Newell Simon Hall• With a personality• That can obey social

conventions

Make interacting with robots easy and entertaining

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Expressiveness

Drama provides models for expressive behavior without the effort of “building a human”

Delsarte’s code of expressions

– French dramatist in 1800s, create perception of emotion

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Interaction

Gesture, expression, gaze and other non-verbal cues are important

Must have reasonable responses to unexpected behavior

Must have predictable responses to normal behavior

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Related Work: Software Agents

REA (Justine Cassell)

- multimodal communication Oz project (Reilly, Bates)

- interactive drama, character design

Virtual Theater project (Barbara Hayes-Roth)

- improvisation, character design

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Related Work: Robots

Kismet (Cynthia Breazeal)

- expression Xavier (Yasushi Nakauchi)

- personal space Nursebot

- natural language communication, social behavior

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Background Work: Robot Improv

Short plays improvised by two Nomad scouts Goal-oriented behavior is dramatic behavior Inner obstacles influence how goals are

achieved Robot-robot interaction for human audience

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Background Work: Xavier

Used concept of personal space to model how people stand in line

Experimentally determined size and shape of personal space for task

Used stereo vision to recognize lines of people and their orientation

Implemented behavior to enter and wait in line

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Vikia

Tracks people with laser range finder Executes scripts based on perceptions First experiment

• Question: How willing will people be to engage in a short interaction with the robot ?

• Task: Ask a poll question.

Baseline – no face, no speech recognition

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Experimental Results

Setting: busy hallway 15 minute trial 50 people passed 6 stopped 4 answered Vikia’s question

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Experimental Results

The majority of people in the hallway didn’t even look at the robot (CMU bias?)

Initiating interaction was more successful with a captive audience

People often played with the camera on the robot, answered questions in verbose manner

Timeouts, rich state transition model were important

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Next Steps

Integrating speech recognition, movement Integrating vision-based people tracking

(Adrian Hilti) Behavior recognition

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Future Work

Emotional model Plan-based approach to interaction Learning of social conventions