User-defined challenges and desiderata for robotics and autonomous systems in health and social care settings

ABSTRACT

We report the needs and challenges identified by health and social care professionals and service users for robotics and autonomous systems that are of importance to researchers and policymakers. To this end, we held eight workshops in different locations across Cornwall (UK) in which we raised awareness of the applications and opportunities of assistive robots. The 223 participants could interact physically with four robots, watched a multimedia presentation including video and use-case scenarios and then took part in 33 focus groups. Content analysis was carried out based on summaries written by facilitators during the focus groups. The focus groups produced 163 challenges that may have digital solutions including 78 suitable for robotic assistive technology, in three main areas: maintaining independence at home, social isolation, and rurality. Although further research is needed with technology and its implementation, this study shows that health and social care professionals, patients, carers, and students are willing to consider using robotics and autonomous systems in health and social care settings.     

Symbol emergence in robotics: a survey

Humans can learn a language through physical interaction with their environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form symbol systems and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development. Recently, many studies have been conducted regarding the construction of robotic systems and machine learning methods that can learn a language through embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems. Understanding human?-social interactions and developing a robot that can smoothly communicate with human users in the long term require an understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems. The embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually alter a symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER represents a constructive approach towards a symbol emergence system. The symbol emergence system is socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e. humans and developmental robots. In this paper, specifically, we describe some state-of-art research topics concerning SER, such as multimodal categorization, word discovery, and double articulation analysis. They enable robots to discover words and their embodied meanings from raw sensory-motor information, including visual information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future directions for research in SER.     

The evolution of robotics research

This article surveys traditional research topics in industrial robotics and mobile robotics and then expands on new trends in robotics research that focus more on the interaction between human and robot. The new trends in robotics research have been denominated service robotics because of their general goal of getting robots closer to human social needs, and this article surveys research on service robotics such as medical robotics, rehabilitation robotics, underwater robotics, field robotics, construction robotics and humanoid robotics. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the evolution of research topics in robotics from classical motion control for industrial robots to modern intelligent control techniques and social learning paradigms, among other aspects     

康复辅助机器人及其物理人机交互方法

面对中国社会快速老龄化现状和庞大的残疾人群,康复辅助机器人研究具有重要学术价值和广阔的应用前景.康复辅助机器人研究涉及神经科学、生物力学、机器人自动控制等领域知识,是机器人最具挑战性和最受关注的研究领域之一.与其他机器人不同,康复辅助机器人的作用对象是人,存在人与机器人的信息交流和能量交换,物理人机交互控制方法是其研究核心和关键技术.本文以神经康复机器人、穿戴式外骨骼、智能假肢等应用为例,介绍当前的研究现状,并重点介绍人体运动意图识别方法和交互控制方法等研究重点和难点.最后展望该领域的未来技术发展方向.     

User—robot personality matching and assistive robot behavior adaptation for post-stroke rehabilitation therapy

This paper describes a hands-off socially assistive therapist robot designed to monitor, assist, encourage, and socially interact with post-stroke users engaged in rehabilitation exercises. We investigate the role of the robot’s personality in the hands-off therapy process, focusing on the relationship between the level of extroversion–introversion of the robot and the user. We also demonstrate a behavior adaptation system capable of adjusting its social interaction parameters (e.g., interaction distances/proxemics, speed, and vocal content) toward customized post-stroke rehabilitation therapy based on the user’s personality traits and task performance. Three validation experiment sets are described. The first maps the user’s extroversion–introversion personality dimension to a spectrum of robot therapy styles that range from challenging to nurturing. The second and the third experiments adjust the personality matching dynamically to adapt the robot’s therapy styles based on user personality and performance. The reported results provide first evidence for user preference for personality matching in the assistive domain and demonstrate how the socially assistive robot’s autonomous behavior adaptation to the user’s personality can result in improved human task performance. This work was supported by USC Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) Program and the Okawa Foundation.     

Perception of own and robot engagement in human–robot interactions and their dependence on robotics knowledge

Communication between socially assistive robots and humans might be facilitated by intuitively understandable mechanisms. To investigate the effects of some key nonverbal gestures on a human’s own engagement and robot engagement experienced by humans, participants read a series of instructions to a robot that responded with nods, blinks, changes in gaze direction, or a combination of these. Unbeknown to the participants, the robot had no form of speech processing or gesture recognition, but simply measured speech volume levels, responding with gestures whenever a lull in sound was detected. As measured by visual analogue scales, engagement of participants was not differentially affected by the different responses of the robot. However, their perception of the robot’s engagement in the task, its likability and its understanding of the instructions depended on the gesture presented, with nodding being the most effective response. Participants who self-reported greater robotics knowledge reported higher overall engagement and greater success at developing a relationship with the robot. However, self-reported robotics knowledge did not differentially affect the impact of robot gestures. This suggests that greater familiarity with robotics may help to maximise positive experiences for humans involved in human–robot interactions without affecting the impact of the type of signal sent by the robot.     

Why Would I Use This in My Home? A Model of Domestic Social Robot Acceptance

Many independent studies in social robotics and human–robot interaction have gained knowledge on various factors that affect people’s perceptions of and behaviors toward robots. However, only a few of those studies aimed to develop models of social robot acceptance integrating a wider range of such factors. With the rise of robotic technologies for everyday environments, such comprehensive research on relevant acceptance factors is increasingly necessary. This article presents a conceptual model of social robot acceptance with a strong theoretical base, which has been tested among the general Dutch population (n = 1,168) using structural equation modeling. The results show a strong role of normative believes that both directly and indirectly affect the anticipated acceptance of social robots for domestic purposes. Moreover, the data show that, at least at this stage of diffusion within society, people seem somewhat reluctant to accept social behaviors from robots. The current findings of our study and their implications serve to push the field of acceptable social robotics forward. For the societal acceptance of social robots, it is vital to include the opinions of future users at an early stage of development. This way future designs can be better adapted to the preferences of potential users.     

Assessing the effect of persuasive robots interactive social cues on users’ psychological reactance,liking, trusting beliefs and compliance

ABSTRACT

Research in the field of social robotics suggests that enhancing social cues in robots can elicit more social responses in users. It is however not clear how users respond socially to persuasive social robots and whether such reactions will be more pronounced when the robots feature more interactive social cues. In the current research, we examine social responses towards persuasive attempts provided by a robot featuring different numbers of interactive social cues. A laboratory experiment assessed participants’ psychological reactance, liking, trusting beliefs and compliance toward a persuasive robot that either presented users with: no interactive social cues (random head movements and random social praises), low number of interactive social cues (head mimicry), or high number of interactive social cues (head mimicry and proper timing for social praise). Results show that a persuasive robot with the highest number of interactive social cues invoked lower reactance and was liked more than the robots in the other two conditions. Furthermore, results suggest that trusting beliefs towards persuasive robots can be enhanced by utilizing praise as presented by social robots in no interactive social cues and high number of interactive social cues conditions. However, interactive social cues did not contribute to higher compliance.     

Correction to: Investigating socially assistive systems from system design and evaluation: a systematic review

Purpose The development of assistive technologies that support people in social interactions has attracted increased attention in HCI. This paper presents a systematic review of studies of Socially Assistive Systems targeted at older adults and people with disabilities. The purpose is threefold: (1) Characterizing related assistive systems with a special focus on the system design, primarily including HCI technologies used and user-involvement approach taken; (2) Examining their ways of system evaluation; (3) Reflecting on insights for future design research. Methods A systematic literature search was conducted using the keywords “social interactions” and “assistive technologies” within the following databases: Scopus, Web of Science, ACM, Science Direct, PubMed, and IEEE Xplore. Results Sixty-five papers met the inclusion criteria and were further analyzed. Our results showed that there were 11 types of HCI technologies that supported social interactions for target users. The most common was cognitive and meaning understanding technologies, often applied with wearable devices for compensating users’ sensory loss; 33.85% of studies involved end-users and stakeholders in the design phase; Four types of evaluation methods were identified. The majority of studies adopted laboratory experiments to measure user-system interaction and system validation. Proxy users were used in system evaluation, especially in initial experiments; 42.46% of evaluations were conducted in field settings, primarily including the participants’ own homes and institutions. Conclusion We contribute an overview of Socially Assistive Systems that support social interactions for older adults and people with disabilities, as well as illustrate emerging technologies and research opportunities for future work.

     

Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center

The World Trade Center (WTC) rescue response provided an unfortunate opportunity to study the human-robot interactions (HRI) during a real unstaged rescue for the first time. A post-hoc analysis was performed on the data collected during the response, which resulted in 17 findings on the impact of the environment and conditions on the HRI: the skills displayed and needed by robots and humans, the details of the Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task, the social informatics in the USAR domain, and what information is communicated at what time. The results of this work impact the field of robotics by providing a case study for HRI in USAR drawn from an unstaged USAR effort. Eleven recommendations are made based on the findings that impact the robotics, computer science, engineering, psychology, and rescue fields. These recommendations call for group organization and user confidence studies, more research into perceptual and assistive interfaces, and formal models of the state of the robot, state of the world, and information as to what has been observed.     

Applied ontologies and standards for service robots

Service robotics is an emerging application area for human-centered technologies. The rise of household and personal assistance robots forecasts a human–robot collaborative society. One of the robotics community’s major task is to streamline development trends, work on the harmonization of taxonomies and ontologies, along with the standardization of terms, interfaces and technologies. It is important to keep the scientific progress and public understanding synchronous, through efficient outreach and education. These efforts support the collaboration among research groups, and lead to widely accepted standards, beneficial for both manufacturers and users. This article describes the necessity of developing robotics ontologies and standards focusing on the past and current research efforts. In addition, the paper proposes a roadmap for service robotics ontology development. The IEEE Robotics & Automation Society is sponsoring the working group Ontologies for Robotics and Automation. The efforts of the Working group are presented here, aiming to connect the cutting edge technology with the users of these services—the general public.     

Let’s keep in touch online: a Facebook aware virtual human interface

A virtual human is an effective interface for interacting with users and plays an important role in carrying out certain tasks. As social networking sites are getting more and more popular, we propose a Facebook aware virtual human. The social networking sites are used to empower virtual humans for interpersonal conversational interaction in this paper. We combine Internet world, physical world and 3D virtual world together to create a new interface for users to interact with an autonomous virtual human which can behave like a real modern human. In order to take advantages of social networking sites, virtual human gathers information of a user from its profile, its likes, dislikes and gauge mood from most recent status update. In two user studies, we investigated whether and how this new interface can enhance human–virtual human interaction. Some positive results concluded from these studies will be guidelines on research and development of future virtual human interfaces.     

Assistive mobility devices focusing on Smart Walkers: Classification and review

In an aging society it is extremely important to develop devices, which can support and aid the elderly in their daily life. This demands means and tools that extend independent living and promote improved health.Thus, the goal of this article is to review the state of the art in the robotic technology for mobility assistive devices for people with mobility disabilities. The important role that robotics can play in mobility assistive devices is presented, as well as the identification and survey of mobility assistive devices subsystems with a particular focus on the walkers technology. The advances in the walkers’ field have been enormous and have shown a great potential on helping people with mobility disabilities. Thus it is presented a review of the available literature of walkers and are discussed major advances that have been made and limitations to be overcome.     

End-user programming architecture facilitates the uptake of robots in social therapies

This paper proposes an architecture that makes programming of robot behavior of an arbitrary complexity possible for end-users and shows the technical solutions in a way that is easy to understand and generalize to different situations. It aims to facilitate the uptake and actual use of robot technologies in therapies for training social skills to autistic children. However, the framework is easy to generalize for an arbitrary human–robot interaction application, where users with no technical background need to program robots, i.e. in various assistive robotics applications. We identified the main needs of end-user programming of robots as a basic prerequisite for the uptake of robots in assistive applications. These are reusability, modularity, affordances for natural interaction and the ease of use. After reviewing the shortcomings of the existing architectures, we developed an initial architecture according to these principles and embedded it in a robot platform. Further, we used a co-creation process to develop and concretize the architecture to facilitate solutions and create affordances for robot specialists and therapists. Several pilot tests showed that different user groups, including therapists with general computer skills and adolescents with autism could make simple training or general behavioral scenarios within 1 h, by connecting existing behavioral blocks and by typing textual robot commands for fine-tuning the behaviors. In addition, this paper explains the basic concepts behind the TiViPE based robot control platform, and gives guidelines for choosing the robot programming tool and designing end-user platforms for robots.     

Social and collaborative aspects of interaction with a service robot

To an increasing extent, robots are being designed to become a part of the lives of ordinary people. This calls for new models of the interaction between humans and robots, taking advantage of human social and communicative skills. Furthermore, human–robot relationships must be understood in the context of use of robots, and based on empirical studies of humans and robots in real settings. This paper discusses social aspects of interaction with a service robot, departing from our experiences of designing a fetch-and-carry robot for motion-impaired users in an office environment. We present the motivations behind the design of the Cero robot, especially its communication paradigm. Finally, we discuss experiences from a recent usage study, and research issues emerging from this work. A conclusion is that addressing only the primary user in service robotics is unsatisfactory, and that the focus should be on the setting, activities and social interactions of the group of people where the robot is to be used.     

Discovering socially important locations of social media users

Socially important locations are places that are frequently visited by social media users in their social media life. Discovering socially interesting, popular or important locations from a location based social network has recently become important for recommender systems, targeted advertisement applications, and urban planning, etc. However, discovering socially important locations from a social network is challenging due to the data size and variety, spatial and temporal dimensions of the datasets, the need for developing computationally efficient approaches, and the difficulty of modeling human behavior. In the literature, several studies are conducted for discovering socially important locations. However, majority of these studies focused on discovering locations without considering historical data of social media users. They focused on analysis of data of social groups without considering each user’s preferences in these groups. In this study, we proposed a method and interest measures to discover socially important locations that consider historical user data and each user’s (individual’s) preferences. The proposed algorithm was compared with a naïve alternative using real-life Twitter dataset. The results showed that the proposed algorithm outperforms the naïve alternative.     

Evaluation of a Small Socially-Assistive Humanoid Robot in Intelligent Homes for the Care of the Elderly

The ageing population phenomenon is pushing the design of innovative solutions to provide assistance to the elderly. In this context a socially–assistive robot can act as a proactive interface in a smart-home environment, providing multimodal communication channels and generating positive feelings in users. The present paper reports results of a short term and a long term evaluation of a small socially assistive humanoid robot in a smart home environment. Eight elderly people tested an integrated smart–home robot system in five real–world scenarios. Six of the participants experienced the system in two sessions over a two week period; the other two participants had a prolonged experience of eight sessions over a three month period. Results showed that the small humanoid robot was trusted by the participants. A cross–cultural comparison showed that results were not due to the cultural background of the participants. The long term evaluation showed that the participants might engage in an emotional relationship with the robot, but that perceived enjoyment might decrease over time.     

Achievements and future directions in self-reconfigurable modular robotic systems

In this study, a comprehensive review of achievements in the self-reconfigurable modular robotics field and future directions are given. Self-reconfigurable modular robots (SRMRs) are known as autonomous kinematic machines that can change their shape by rearranging the connectivity of their modules to perform new tasks, adapt to changing circumstances, and recover from damage. Versatility, reliability, and low-cost are the fundamental promises of SRMRs when compared with conventional robots. This study emphasized the achievements in the field considering the promises and identified the gaps to be filled in the future. The main distinguishing feature of an SRMR is the capability of configuring its shape during operation. Flexibility in shape supported by appropriate controller strategies brings flexibility in task assignment. Classification of SRMRs is enriched by adding a new section based on assigned tasks to the robot. In addition, the classification based on mechanical and controller design aspects is thoroughly inspected in our study. A new subsection of material selection is introduced in the mechanical design aspects section. Adding these sections to the classification is the main difference between our study and the previous review studies. It is expected that the SRMRs field will have more interactions with materials science in the future. The study is concluded by emphasizing the promises of SRMRs and giving a future vision of the field.     

The current state and future outlook of rescue robotics

Robotic technologies, whether they are remotely operated vehicles, autonomous agents, assistive devices, or novel control interfaces, offer many promising capabilities for deployment in real‐world environments. Postdisaster scenarios are a particularly relevant target for applying such technologies, due to the challenging conditions faced by rescue workers and the possibility to increase their efficacy while decreasing the risks they face. However, field‐deployable technologies for rescue work have requirements for robustness, speed, versatility, and ease of use that may not be matched by the state of the art in robotics research. This paper aims to survey the current state of the art in ground and aerial robots, marine and amphibious systems, and human–robot control interfaces and assess the readiness of these technologies with respect to the needs of first responders and disaster recovery efforts. We have gathered expert opinions from emergency response stakeholders and researchers who conduct field deployments with them to understand these needs, and we present this assessment as a way to guide future research toward technologies that will make an impact in real‐world disaster response and recovery.