United States

This study explored how a table-top robot as a recipient of explanations can be applied to the education of students with autism spectrum disorder and intellectual disability. Four 17-year-old participants were recruited from a special needs school. We observed their engagement in assigned tasks and any significant interactions with the robot during the three personalized learning sessions in the school environment. During sessions without a robot, each student was asked to solve arithmetic questions related to purchasing items. During sessions with a robot, each student was required to not only solve questions but also explain the processes or results of simple calculations to the robot. We examined the behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement of each participant during personalized learning sessions. The results showed that participants solved problems faster, more accurately, or with fewer distractions in the with-robot conditions compared to the task-only conditions. It suggests that this approach, where students explain what they know to a robot, might be effectively adopted for students in special needs schools. Future research should examine the role of robots more comprehensively, acknowledging the limitations of this study, such as the measurement of only three sessions.

IEEE RO-MAN 2024

Students with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Intellectual Disability Teach a Robot

arithmetic skills

special needs school

table-top robot

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. This theme also touches upon people's expectations and perceptions of robots, as well as other social, cognitive and cultural factors that will influence human-robot interactions. We will have a special session/track on this topic, invite targeted submissions and include plenary speakers who are specialist in this area. We sincerely hope that this focus will help enlighten the design-thinking of all of us as we fabricate and program our own various systems.

To access RO-MAN Virtual 2021, [please register here.](https://ro-man2021.org/registration/)

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

RO-MAN 2021's theme is trustworthiness and cooperation. We chose this term well before the pandemic put the world on edge and added a new reason for us to question our own personal safety when in the company of others. But what about in the company of social robots? What would cause us to trust, or not trust, them? How do we as researchers create that feeling, that critical component of any relationship? With social robots, it is of course largely in our power to design the physical form, the control code and the interface software to maximize trustworthiness, facilitate cooperation and enhance the quality of human-robot interaction. 

technical paper

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Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2024, was held at Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, USA.

The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was **“Embracing Human-Centered HRI”**.

With the continuous technological effort of understanding human needs, creating human-desired robotic systems, and developing real human user experiences, we are marching together towards building a promising and excellent human quality of life, all for our wellness and our next generation.

The conference provided a forum for researchers and practitioners to discuss a variety of topics related to the broad theme of Robot and Human Interactive Communication involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies, and generated more insights for the future of Robot and Human Interactive Communication!

We hope you continue to enjoy the post-conference content on Underline!
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The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication was held in Pasadena, California, USA. The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was “Embracing Human-Centered HRI”.

The landscape of education with social robots is evolving, especially within the realm of music education. However, past studies have focused on children as music learners and such verbal behaviors as praise. Therefore, it remains unknown whether existing studies are effective for adult learners in musical education as well as how to effectively design the non-verbal behaviors of robots. This study investigates the effective behaviors of social robots by comparing three kinds of listening behaviors: none, nodding (simple listening), and enjoying (affective listening). We developed a music education support system that consists of a social robot and a MIDI keyboard and conducted an experiment with adult participants. Our experimental results described the advantages of affective-listening behavior during music education over simple listening and non-listening based on gender.

Effects of Listening Behaviors of a Social Robot on Adult's Motivation and Performance in Piano Practice

Stroke-induced aphasia, an acquired speech impairment, poses significant challenges to individuals' communication abilities. Our robot-assisted speech training app aims to facilitate home-based, self-administered training for individuals with aphasia to complement their speech therapy. We evaluated our app in a single-session study with four individuals with aphasia in a rehabilitation setting. Each participant had a different severity grade of the condition, including one case of global aphasia. Our findings suggest an overall positive user experience, with indications that the training facilitated by the robot is suitable for individuals across all severity grades of aphasia, though exercise customization is crucial. Participants, even those with limited technical experience, adapted to using the system by themselves quickly. However, usability issues specific to this diverse target group were noted, such as the length of explanations and the abundant use of robot gestures, which will be addressed in future iterations.

"Repeat after Me" - Exploring Robot-Assisted Speech Training for Varied Aphasia Severities*

Social robots are being introduced in a variety of educational domains with great success. These social robots are often designed by drawing inspiration from practices held by human teachers. Contingent mediations are a prime example of a high-quality teaching practice that supports better outcomes in human-human teaching. This can inform the design of social robots. Current research on robot use in education has focused on curriculum-level contingent mediations where the difficulty level of subsequent tasks are adjusted to the current capabilities of a learner. However, task-level contingent mediations that provide support for students learning during a specific task remain unexplored. This research investigates whether patterns of task-level mediations differ between a robot, virtual, and human agent, as well as their effects on learning outcomes. To investigate these research questions, we designed instruction that utilizes contingent mediational flows, based on formative assessment data, to be delivered by a human, robot, and virtual agent to teach grade 3-5 children science words. We identified 23 unique instructional patterns. Then, we compared these patterns across teaching agents and their effects on learning outcomes. Overall, our study demonstrated that high-quality contingent mediations support childrens science vocabulary in learning regardless of the teaching agent.

Exploring Task-Level Contingent Mediations for Vocabulary Instruction across Robot, Virtual, and Human Teachers

Parental estrangement can cause long-term harm to socio-emotional skills, mental health and wellbeing. This is pronounced for children who experienced trauma. Robo- Therapists have been used to train children to express emotions, but such robots are often human replacements and tend to be too costly to deploy widely. We propose e-MoBo, a low-cost, non-humanoid Robo-Mediator of our own design to train childrens socio-emotional skills towards creating stronger relationships with others. We report on the developing e-MoBo and results of a field study with the current prototype and 14 neurotypical children, ages 5-9, as we prepare to deploy e-MoBo in a residential center with traumatized children. Our results suggest that e-MoBo, compared to a control, helps children express emotions, offering the promise of a low-cost, nonanthropomorphic, Robo-Mediator meeting childrens needs.

E-MoBo, a Low-Cost, “Robo-Mediator” Helping Therapists Teach Children How to Express Emotions Insights from Field Testing

Robots powered by Artificial Intelligence require continuous sensing to function and interact autonomously with their environment. This may create concerns for their users. Here, we describe a study in the context of an office environment equipped with autonomous delivery robots. Our study aims to understand the employees' current comprehension of the data captured by the robots, the nature of their concerns and ways to mitigate those. We found that the employees have little knowledge about data capture and that providing such knowledge can go either way, reassuring or generating new concerns which are often contextual. We qualitatively analysed reasons for having or not having concerns. Our findings include that trust in the employer is an important factor limiting them.

Investigating Privacy in the Context of Office Delivery Robots

Despite advances in areas such as the personalization of robots, sustaining adoption of robots for long-term use in families remains a challenge. Recent studies have identified integrating robots into families' routines and rituals as a promising approach to support long-term adoption. However, few studies explored the integration of robots into family routines and there is a gap in systematic measures to capture family preferences for robot integration. Building upon existing routine inventories, we developed Family-Robot Routines Inventory (FRRI), with 24 family routines and 24 child routine items, to capture parents' attitudes toward and expectations from the integration of robotic technology into their family routines. Using this inventory, we collected data from 150 parents through an online survey. Our analysis indicates that parents had varying perceptions for the utility of integrating robots into their routines. For example, parents found robot integration to be more helpful in children's individual routines, than to the collective routines of their families. We discuss the design implications of these preliminary findings, and how they may serve as a first step toward understanding the diverse challenges and demands of designing and integrating household robots for families.

Robots in Family Routines: Development of and Initial Insights from the Family-Robot Routines Inventory

A user-centered method of parameterizing robotic system is indispensable to enable workers with lower qualification levels the access to robotic systems. In this paper, different ways and types of communication are investigated to increase the usability during the programming of a movable robotic cell utilized for mounting processes inside a production line. Thereto, the entire usability circle given by the ISO 9241-210 is applied. Using the feedback of 13 participants from an initial formative evaluation inside a real production line, usability problems and six requirement categories were identified. Applying the prototypical design, we evaluated four possibilities of multimodal and bidirectional communication utilizing audio, haptic and visual channels. The results from the final usability study in the laboratory reveal that haptic plus visual input combined with visual plus audio feedback is assessed as most intuitive. Pre-experience with robots showed no significant influence on usability, acceptance and perceived safety in most modalities.

Investigating Human-Robot Interaction: A User-Centered Approach to Robotic System Setup and Programming

The field of robotics has shown significant advances in autonomous systems, particularly in robot navigation. Since the decisions made during navigation can be difficult for human operators to understand, research aims to provide explanations that improve human-robot interaction (HRI). However, generating and designing such explanations with the intention of improving robot-related human factors is still an ongoing research challenge. This paper addresses this challenge by investigating the impact of different explanation types on a set of human factors in the context of robot navigation. For this purpose, we conducted a user study that examined the impact of six different explanation types on commonly used human factors, including trust, satisfaction, situation awareness, likeability, understandability, and perceived usefulness. Additionally, the study provides indications of their general applicability for robot navigation explanations through creation of sum ranks across the observed human factor metrics. The results show that depending on the chosen explanation type, a significant impact on the measured factors can be observed. While constraint-based explanations are generally rated highly across all factors, apologetic explanations are not perceived well across all measured human factors. Our results provide insights into the impact of explanation types used for robot navigation scenarios on robot-related human factors, and also provide practical insights for designing explanations for robot navigation scenarios.

Influence of Different Explanation Types on Robot-Related Human Factors in Robot Navigation Tasks

This work illustrates the testing of the Spot Robot performed at the training camp of Civil Protection and ANPAS (National Association of Public Assistance) in Foligno. The camp simulates the aftermath of an earthquake with different types of collapsed buildings. We teleoperated the quadruped Spot robot in different areas of the camp where Spot needs to address different challenges. The focus of the testing was not on the objective performance of the robot but on how the robot was subjectively perceived by rescuers of ANPAS and Civil Protection. Initially, we formulated and tested two hypotheses to check if locomotion in some areas is perceived better than in other areas and if there are perceivable differences when the robot is using different types of locomotion gaits. Then, we conducted unstructured interviews with participants who observed the robot in action to describe their rescue procedures and give us suggestions and opinions on what operations they expect the robot might perform.

Perceptions and Opinions of Rescuers about a Quadruped Robot in an Earthquake Scenario

In the pursuit of enhancing the quality of life, research in domestic robotics is rapidly evolving, offering a broad spectrum of services that not only provide practical aid but also contribute to emotional well-being and social interaction. However, existing domestic robots often lack essential features necessary for continuous interaction with humans and their surroundings, such as stability, mobility, safety, size, and physical interaction capabilities. Addressing this need, this paper introduces the development of a prototype robot tailored for harmonious coexistence with humans. This robot utilizes its own heavy equipment, such as batteries and actuators, to achieve an intrinsically balanced structure along with a comprehensive set of features optimized for seamless integration into human-centric environments. Focusing on the mechanical design of the robot, we evaluated its performance through a series of experiments, highlighting its mechanical advantages, addressing its limitations, and proposing solutions to enhance its performance for future applications.

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Effects of Listening Behaviors of a Social Robot on Adult's Motivation and Performance in Piano Practice

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