Algorithms for Charismatic Robots Rogers 226 Mon, 04/04/2016 - 10:00am
Heather Knight PhD candidate, Carnegie Mellon Abstract: Robots are entering human environments in increasing numbers. These robots perform functions in shared spaces (e.g. autonomous driving, vacuuming), coordinate with humans (e.g., collaborative manufacturing, object delivery) and leverage sociability (e.g., assistive robots, entertainment). Charismatic robots can add value to human-robot interfaces by abstracting human social rules and interaction strategies into the perception and/or behavior systems of robots. Such systems can be both functional and expressive, but should add social value to people’s experience with these machines. Unfortunately, there are few generalized models of artificial social expression, especially for the most common robot form-factors. Such models do exist in human acting training, and they qualitatively describe how to construct artificial characters and expression. My research seeks to operationalize models from dramaturgical disciplines (e.g., movement training) that aid in the construction of robot nonverbal behaviors. The goals are: 1) to make the model algorithmic, 2) apply the model to low-degree of freedom robots, and 3) refine our parameterizations using the expertise of actors and performers. This talk outlines how we have operationalized the Laban Effort System, a qualitative set of expressive motion descriptives from dance and theater training, to a set of quantitative motion features that robots can use to convey their internal states to people. I will share examples of these feature implementations on three low-degree of freedom robots, including two robot heads and a mobile robot. During naturalistic deployment using the autonomous omni-directional CoBot robots, we find that robot motion characteristics help bystanders interpret the robot’s current state (e.g., rushed), impacting their likelihood of interrupting a robot's task. Expanding on this finding, we are currently investigating additional strategies to flexibly train robot state communications with people in order to effectively include robot expressions into everyday robot tasks. Bio: URL: http://eecs.oregonstate.edu/colloquium/algorithms-charismatic-robots _______________________________________________ Colloquium mailing list [email protected] https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/mailman/listinfo/colloquium
