More Like this

1. Perceived Social Intelligence as Evaluation of Socially Navigation

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3434074.3447226  

   Honour, AnaLisa; Banisetty, Santosh Balajee; Feil-Seifer, David (March 2021, HRI '21 Companion: Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction)

   null (Ed.)

   As Human-Robot Interaction becomes more sophisticated, measuring the performance of a social robot is crucial to gauging the effectiveness of its behavior. However, social behavior does not necessarily have strict performance metrics that other autonomous behavior can have. Indeed, when considering robot navigation, a socially-appropriate action may be one that is sub-optimal, resulting in longer paths, longer times to get to a goal. Instead, we can rely on subjective assessments of the robot's social performance by a participant in a robot interaction or by a bystander. In this paper, we use the newly-validated Perceived Social Intelligence (PSI) scale to examine the perception of non-humanoid robots in non-verbal social scenarios. We show that there are significant differences between the perceived social intelligence of robots exhibiting SAN behavior compared to one using a traditional navigation planner in scenarios such as waiting in a queue and group behavior. 

   more » « less
2. Perception of Social Intelligence in Robots Performing False-Belief Tasks

   https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN46459.2019.8956467  

   Sturgeon, Stephanie; Palmer, Andrew; Blankenburg, Janelle; Feil-Seifer, David (October 2019, International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN))

   This study evaluated how a robot demonstrating a Theory of Mind (ToM) influenced human perception of social intelligence and animacy in a human-robot interaction. Data was gathered through an online survey where participants watched a video depicting a NAO robot either failing or passing the Sally-Anne false-belief task. Participants (N = 60) were randomly assigned to either the Pass or Fail condition. A Perceived Social Intelligence Survey and the Perceived Intelligence and Animacy subsections of the Godspeed Questionnaire were used as measures. The Godspeed was given before viewing the task to measure participant expectations, and again after to test changes in opinion. Our findings show that robots demonstrating ToM significantly increase perceived social intelligence, while robots demonstrating ToM deficiencies are perceived as less socially intelligent. 

   more » « less
3. A MultiModal Social Robot Toward Personalized Emotion Interaction

   Xie, Baijun Xie; Park, Chung Hyuk (November 2021, Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI) Fall Symposium)

   Human emotions are expressed through multiple modalities, including verbal and non-verbal information. Moreover, the affective states of human users can be the indicator for the level of engagement and successful interaction, suitable for the robot to use as a rewarding factor to optimize robotic behaviors through interaction. This study demonstrates a multimodal human-robot interaction (HRI) framework with reinforcement learning to enhance the robotic interaction policy and personalize emotional interaction for a human user. The goal is to apply this framework in social scenarios that can let the robots generate a more natural and engaging HRI framework. 

   more » « less
4. The Effects of Robot Voices and Appearances on Users’ Emotion Recognition and Subjective Perception

   https://doi.org/10.1142/S0219843623500019  

   Ko, Sangjin; Barnes, Jaclyn; Dong, Jiayuan; Park, Chung Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna; Jeon, Myounghoon (February 2023, International Journal of Humanoid Robotics)

   As the influence of social robots in people’s daily lives grows, research on understanding people’s perception of robots including sociability, trust, acceptance, and preference becomes more pervasive. Research has considered visual, vocal, or tactile cues to express robots’ emotions, whereas little research has provided a holistic view in examining the interactions among different factors influencing emotion perception. We investigated multiple facets of user perception on robots during a conversational task by varying the robots’ voice types, appearances, and emotions. In our experiment, 20 participants interacted with two robots having four different voice types. While participants were reading fairy tales to the robot, the robot gave vocal feedback with seven emotions and the participants evaluated the robot’s profiles through post surveys. The results indicate that (1) the accuracy of emotion perception differed depending on presented emotions, (2) a regular human voice showed higher user preferences and naturalness, (3) but a characterized voice was more appropriate for expressing emotions with significantly higher accuracy in emotion perception, and (4) participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy with the animal robot than the humanoid robot. A follow-up study ([Formula: see text]) with voice-only conditions confirmed that the importance of embodiment. The results from this study could provide the guidelines needed to design social robots that consider emotional aspects in conversations between robots and users. 

   more » « less
5. Community Embedded Robotics: Vid2Real An Online Video Dataset about Perceived Social Intelligence in Human Robot Encounters

   https://doi.org/10.18738/T8/KAHJIB  

   Chan, Yao-Cheng; Modak, Sadanand; Hauser, Elliott; Biswas, Joydeep; Hart, Justin; Esteva, Maria (January 2024, Texas Data Repository)

   Introduction This dataset was gathered during the Vid2Real online video-based study, which investigates humans’ perception of robots' intelligence in the context of an incidental Human-Robot encounter. The dataset contains participants' questionnaire responses to four video study conditions, namely Baseline, Verbal, Body language, and Body language + Verbal. The videos depict a scenario where a pedestrian incidentally encounters a quadruped robot trying to enter a building. The robot uses verbal commands or body language to try to ask for help from the pedestrian in different study conditions. The differences in the conditions were manipulated using the robot’s verbal and expressive movement functionalities. Dataset Purpose The dataset includes the responses of human subjects about the robots' social intelligence used to validate the hypothesis that robot social intelligence is positively correlated with human compliance in an incidental human-robot encounter context. The video based dataset was also developed to obtain empirical evidence that can be used to design future real-world HRI studies. Dataset Contents Four videos, each corresponding to a study condition. Four sets of Perceived Social Intelligence Scale data. Each set corresponds to one study condition Four sets of compliance likelihood questions, each set include one Likert question and one free-form question One set of Godspeed questionnaire data. One set of Anthropomorphism questionnaire data. A csv file containing the participants demographic data, Likert scale data, and text responses. A data dictionary explaining the meaning of each of the fields in the csv file. Study Conditions There are 4 videos (i.e. study conditions), the video scenarios are as follows. Baseline: The robot walks up to the entrance and waits for the pedestrian to open the door without any additional behaviors. This is also the "control" condition. Verbal: The robot walks up to the entrance, and says ”can you please open the door for me” to the pedestrian while facing the same direction, then waits for the pedestrian to open the door. Body Language: The robot walks up to the entrance, turns its head to look at the pedestrian, then turns its head to face the door, and waits for the pedestrian to open the door. Body Language + Verbal: The robot walks up to the entrance, turns its head to look at the pedestrian, and says ”Can you open the door for me” to the pedestrian, then waits for the pedestrian to open the door. Image showing the Verbal condition. Image showing the Body Language condition. A within-subject design was adopted, and all participants experienced all conditions. The order of the videos, as well as the PSI scales, were randomized. After receiving consent from the participants, they were presented with one video, followed by the PSI questions and the two exploratory questions (compliance likelihood) described above. This set was repeated 4 times, after which the participants would answer their general perceptions of the robot with Godspeed and AMPH questionnaires. Each video was around 20 seconds and the total study time was around 10 minutes. Video as a Study Method A video-based study in human-robot interaction research is a common method for data collection. Videos can easily be distributed via online participant recruiting platforms, and can reach a larger sample than in-person/lab-based studies. Therefore, it is a fast and easy method for data collection for research aiming to obtain empirical evidence. Video Filming The videos were filmed with a first-person point-of-view in order to maximize the alignment of video and real-world settings. The device used for the recording was an iPhone 12 pro, and the videos were shot in 4k 60 fps. For better accessibility, the videos have been converted to lower resolutions. Instruments The questionnaires used in the study include the Perceived Social Intelligence Scale (PSI), Godspeed Questionnaire, and Anthropomorphism Questionnaire (AMPH). In addition to these questionnaires, a 5-point Likert question and a free-text response measuring human compliance were added for the purpose of the video-based study. Participant demographic data was also collected. Questionnaire items are attached as part of this dataset. Human Subjects For the purpose of this project, the participants are recruited through Prolific. Therefore, the participants are users of Prolific. Additionally, they are restricted to people who are currently living in the United States, fluent in English, and have no hearing or visual impairments. No other restrictions were imposed. Among the 385 participants, 194 participants identified as female, and 191 as male, the age ranged from 19 to 75 (M = 38.53, SD = 12.86). Human subjects remained anonymous. Participants were compensated with $4 upon submission approval. This study was reviewed and approved by UT Austin Internal Review Board. Robot The dataset contains data about humans’ perceived social intelligence of a Boston Dynamics’ quadruped robot Spot (Explorer model). The robot was selected because quadruped robots are gradually being adopted to provide services such as delivery, surveillance, and rescue. However, there are still issues or obstacles that robots cannot easily overcome by themselves in which they will have to ask for help from nearby humans. Therefore, it is important to understand how humans react to a quadruped robot that they incidentally encounter. For the purposes of this video-study, the robot operation was semi-autonomous, with the navigation being manually teleoperated by an operator and a few standalone autonomous modules to supplement it. Data Collection The data was collected through Qualtrics, a survey development platform. After the completion of data collection, the data was downloaded as a csv file. Data Quality Control Qualtrics automatically detects bots so any response that is flagged as bots are discarded. All incomplete and duplicate responses were discarded. Data Usage This dataset can be used to conduct a meta-analysis on robots' perceived intelligence. Please note that data is coupled with this study design. Users interested in data reuse will have to assess that this dataset is in line with their study design. Acknowledgement This study was funded through the NSF Award # 2219236GCR: Community-Embedded Robotics: Understanding Sociotechnical Interactions with Long-term Autonomous Deployments. 

   more » « less