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A socially assistive robot can support children in developmental and well-being aspects. The robot&#39;s visual aesthetics influences users&#39; initial judgments and is essential for creating first impressions, trust, and desirability. Our work proposes and demonstrates a methodology for evaluating children&#39;s perception of visual qualities in SARs, aiming to pave the way for new design tools to support robotic designers and developers.

IEEE RO-MAN 2021

Overhead Work Assist with Passive Gravity Compensation Mechanism and Horizontal Link Mechanism for Agriculture

visual qualities

robot design

child-robot interaction

human-robot interaction

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/)

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. 

A socially assistive robot can support children in developmental and well-being aspects. The robot's visual aesthetics influences users' initial judgments and is essential for creating first impressions, trust, and desirability. Our work proposes and demonstrates a methodology for evaluating children's perception of visual qualities in SARs, aiming to pave the way for new design tools to support robotic designers and developers.

panel

With social robots entering the consumer market, there is a growing need to study
children's intention to adopt social robots in a domestic environment. Based on a
content analysis of data from 87 children, we found that hedonic beliefs, and
especially companionship from the robot, were the most mentioned beliefs for
domestic adoption of a social robot. Social beliefs were rarely mentioned. If children
mentioned beliefs for rejecting the robot, they often referred to family members and
family composition.

Exploring Children's Beliefs for Adoption or Rejection of Domestic Social Robots

Childhood ambulatory disorders affect physical, cognitive, and social development. We propose using a custom assistive robot for engaging children in early mobility interventions. Our first study showed that during driving interventions, children looked at the robot more while it was active, but other results were mixed. In our second study on ambulatory free play, children looked at and engaged with the robot more when it was active. This research is a first step in developing robots for early mobility interventions.

Design of an Assistive Robot for Infant Mobility Interventions

In this work, we present a framework for human-robot collaboration allowing the human operator to alter the robot plan execution online. To achieve this goal, we introduce branched AND/OR graphs, an extension to AND/OR graphs, to manage flexible and adaptable human-robot collaboration. In our study, the operator can alter the plan execution using two implementations of Branched AND/OR graphs for learning by demonstration, using kinesthetic teaching, and task repetition. Finally, we demonstrated the effectiveness of our framework in a defect spotting scenario where the operator supervises robot operations and modifies online the plan when necessary.

Branched AND/OR Graphs: Toward Flexible and Adaptable Human-Robot Collaboration

This paper proposes a novel dynamic method based on Behavior Trees that integrates planning and allocation of tasks in mixed human robot teams, suitable for manufacturing environments. The Behavior Tree formulation allows encoding a single job as a compound of different tasks with temporal constraints. The role allocation problem is solved with multiple simplified online optimization sub-problems. These sub-problems are defined as Mixed-Integer Linear Programs, that, according to the worker-actions related costs and the workers' availability, allocate the yet-to-execute tasks among the available workers.

Older Adults’ Opinion on Social Robot as Companion

This work presents the improvements of Hydracer, a robot manipulator driven by electro-hydrostatic actuators, to achieve human-robot interaction. To solve the problems of Hydracer and to achieve flexible force control, we worked on the system improvements: reduction of internal leakage by considering oil property, enhancement of reliability of ceramics components, and the parameter identification to improve its controllability. Flexible force control of Hydracer by zero-torque control with gravity compensation was realized.


TIRL: Enriching Actor-Critic RL with non-expert human teachers\\ and a Trust Model

This study investigates if and how college students cheat while engaged in a collaborative sorting task with a robot. Our study finds that prior exposure to cheating on the task significantly increases the likelihood of cheating. Yet, the tendency to cheat is not impacted by the clarity of the task rules.

Impact of Human Gaze Behavior and Robot Appearance on Motion Uncertainty During Cooperative Hand Movement Tasks

The contributions, of our study are: a) the comparison of a human vs a robot-tutor in terms of the students’ level of understanding from the course (knowledge acquisition) and opinions about the use of robots in the educational field, b) an analysis of how the exposure of pre-service teachers in a robot-tutor and Computational thinking course affects their robot-related attitudes. c) We investigate the differences in attitudes and understanding from the course between students, after having ten weeks of basically Computational thinking lessons, who have one or two lectures with a robot-tutor.

Interactive Robotic Systems as Boundary-Crossing Robots – the User’s View

Gamified rehabilitation tackles the problem of keeping patients engaged in, and motivated to do physical rehabilitation to improve its efficacy. However, with respect to standard rehabilitation, patients are freer to move about and may compensate their motion difficulties with parasite movements, which would greatly reduce the efficacy of the rehabilitation. To identify and characterize compensatory motions, we collected and analyzed video data of people playing the“tangible Pacman” game (an upper-limb rehabilitation game in which a patient moves a semi-passive robot, the “Pacman”, on a map to collect 6 apples, while being chased by one or two autonomous robots, the “ghosts”). Participants include 10healthy elderly adults and 10 chronic stroke patients, who played multiple runs of the game, with different-sized maps and various game configurations. By analyzing the video recordings we successfully identified higher shoulder and torso lateral tilt compensation in stroke patients and developed a proof-of-concept compensatory motion detection system that relies on a wearable Inertial Measurement Unit and ROS to provide in-game, real-time visual feedback on compensation.

Detecting Compensatory Motions and Providing Informative Feedback During a Tangible Robot Assisted Game for Post-Stroke Rehabilitation

In this work, we designed a teachable robot that encourages a pair of students to discuss their thoughts and teaching decisions during the tutoring session. The robot adapts to the students' talking activity. The results of our user study (n = 68) showed that the adaptive robot was successful in creating more dialogue between dyad members and in increasing task engagement. Over time, the adaptive robot was also able to encourage both members to contribute more equally to the conversation.

A Model for the Representation of the Extraversion-Introversion Personality Traits in the Communication Style of a Social Robot

We implemented a dedicated human-aware navigation system that adapts the configuration of the navigation parameters based on two human-like personalities, extrovert and introvert, and we compared them with a no social behavior. We evaluated the system in a dynamic scenario in which each participant needed to pass by a robot moving in the opposite direction, showing a different personality each time. The results show that 19 out of 20 subjects involved in the study perceived a difference among the personalities exhibited by the robot, both in terms of proxemics and velocity. Furthermore, the results highlight a general preference of a complementary robot’s personality, helping to suggest some guidelines for future works in the human-aware navigation field.

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