Volume 8, Issue 1

The receptionist job, consisting in providing useful indications to visitors in a public office, is one possible employment of social robots. The design and the behaviour of robots expected to be integrated in human societies are crucial issues, and they are dependent on the culture and society in which the robot should be deployed. We study the factors that could be used in the design of a receptionist robot in Brazil, a country with a mix of races and considerable gaps in economic and educational level. This inequality results in the presence of functional illiterate people, unable to use reading, writing and numeracy skills. We invited Brazilian people, including a group of functionally illiterate subjects, to interact with two types of receptionists differing in physical appearance (agent v mechanical robot) and in the sound of the voice (human like v mechanical). Results gathered during the interactions point out a preference for the agent, for the human-like voice and a more intense reaction to stimuli by illiterates. These results provide useful indications that should be considered when designing a receptionist robot, as well as insights on the effect of illiteracy in the interaction.

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through remote control of the robot in so-called Wizard of Oz (WoZ) paradigms.However, there is a need to increase the autonomy of the robot both to lighten the burden on human therapists (who have to remain in control and, importantly, supervise the robot) and to provide a consistent therapeutic experience. This paper seeks to provide insight into increasing the autonomy level of social robots in therapy to move beyond WoZ. With the final aim of improved human-human social interaction for the children, this multidisciplinary research seeks to facilitate the use of social robots as tools in clinical situations by addressing the challenge of increasing robot autonomy.We introduce the clinical framework in which the developments are tested, alongside initial data obtained from patients in a first phase of the project using a WoZ set-up mimicking the targeted supervised-autonomy behaviour. We further describe the implemented system architecture capable of providing the robot with supervised autonomy.

In this paper an overview of the state of research into cognitive robots is given. This is driven by insights arising from research that has moved from simulation to physical robots over the course of a number of sub-projects. A number of major issues arising from seminal research in the area are explored. In particular in the context of advances in the field of robotics and a slowly developing model of cognition and behaviour that is being mapped onto robot colonies. The work presented is ongoing but major themes such as the veracity of data and information, and their effect on robot control architectures are explored. A small number of case studies are presented where the theoretical framework has been used to implement control of physical robots. The limitations of the current research and the wider field of behavioral and cognitive robots are explored.

This paper presents a review on the tri-partite relationship between novelty, intrinsic motivation and reinforcement learning. The paper first presents a literature survey on novelty and the different computational models of novelty detection, with a specific focus on the features of stimuli that trigger a Hedonic value for generating a novelty signal. It then presents an overview of intrinsic motivation and investigations into different models with the aim of exploring deeper co-relationships between specific features of a novelty signal and its effect on intrinsic motivation in producing a reward function. Finally, it presents survey results on reinforcement learning, different models and their functional relationship with intrinsic motivation.

This survey provides an overview of implemented systems, theoretical work, as well as studies of biological systems relevant to the design of artificial learners trying to figure out what a human teacher would like them to do. Implementations of artificial learners are covered, with a focus on experiments trying to find better interpretations of human behavior, as well as algorithms that autonomously improve a model of the teacher. A distinction is made between learners trying to interpret teacher behavior in order to learn what the teacher would like the learner to do on the one hand, and learners whose explicit or implicit goal is to get something from the teacher on the other hand (for example rewards, or knowledge about how the world works). The survey covers the former type of systems. Human teachers are covered, focusing on studies that say something concrete about how one should interpret the behavior of a human teacher that is interacting with an artificial learner. Certain types of biological learners are interesting as inspiration for the types of artificial systems we are concerned with. The survey focus on studies of biological learners adopting normative conventions, as well as joint intentionality team efforts.

The ultimate long-term goal in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is to design robots that can act as a natural extension to humans. This requires the design of robot control architectures to provide structure for the integration of the necessary components into HRI. This paper describes how HBBA, a Hybrid Behavior-Based Architecture, can be used as a unifying framework for integrated design of HRI scenarios. More specifically, we focus here on HBBA’s generic coordination mechanism of behavior-producing modules, which allows to address a wide range or cognitive capabilities ranging from assisted teleoperation to selective attention and episodic memory. Using IRL-1, a humanoid robot equipped with compliant actuators for motion and manipulation, proximity sensors, cameras and a microphone array, three interaction scenarios are implemented: multi-modal teleoperation with physical guidance interaction, fetching-and delivering and tour-guiding.