1. The Social Robots Project
Vikia: A Robot for Social Interaction

2. Different Approaches to Human-Robot Interaction
Non-anthropomorphic
Easy to design, but hard to use
Anthropomorphic
Opposite problem
Continuum exists between the two
Where is it best to focus our efforts?

3. Social Interaction
Focus on the abilities that people use to communicate with each other
Doesn’t require training for users
In service domains, social behavior is an important part of accomplishing the task well (e.g. caretaker, tour guide)

4. Goals of Social Robot Project
Vikia - a robotic greeter / tour guide for Newell Simon Hall
With a personality
That can obey social conventions
Make interacting with robots easy and entertaining

5. Expressiveness
Drama provides models for expressive behavior without the effort of “building a human”
Delsarte’s code of expressions
French dramatist in 1800s, create perception of emotion

6. Interaction
Gesture, expression, gaze and other non-verbal cues are important
Must have reasonable responses to unexpected behavior
Must have predictable responses to normal behavior

7. Related Work: Software Agents
REA (Justine Cassell)
- multimodal communication
Oz project (Reilly, Bates)
- interactive drama, character design
Virtual Theater project (Barbara Hayes-Roth)
- improvisation, character design

8. Related Work: Robots Kismet (Cynthia Breazeal) - expression
Xavier (Yasushi Nakauchi)
- personal space
Nursebot
- natural language communication, social behavior

9. Background Work: Robot Improv
Short plays improvised by two Nomad scouts
Goal-oriented behavior is dramatic behavior
Inner obstacles influence how goals are achieved
Robot-robot interaction for human audience

10. Background Work: Xavier
Used concept of personal space to model how people stand in line
Experimentally determined size and shape of personal space for task
Used stereo vision to recognize lines of people and their orientation
Implemented behavior to enter and wait in line

11. Vikia Tracks people with laser range finder
Executes scripts based on perceptions
First experiment
Question: How willing will people be to engage in a short interaction with the robot ?
Task: Ask a poll question.
Baseline – no face, no speech recognition

12. Experimental Results Setting: busy hallway 15 minute trial
50 people passed
6 stopped
4 answered Vikia’s question

13. Experimental Results
The majority of people in the hallway didn’t even look at the robot (CMU bias?)
Initiating interaction was more successful with a captive audience
People often played with the camera on the robot, answered questions in verbose manner
Timeouts, rich state transition model were important

14. Next Steps Integrating speech recognition, movement
Integrating vision-based people tracking (Adrian Hilti)
Behavior recognition

15. Future Work Emotional model Plan-based approach to interaction
Learning of social conventions