https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~illah/PAPERS/socialroboticssurvey.pdf

A survey of socially interactive robots

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unified treatment of HRI-related problems, to identify key themes, and discuss challenge problems that are likely to shape the field in the near future. Although the review follows a survey structure, the goal of presenting a coherent "story" of HRI means that there are necessarily some well-written, intriguing, and influential papers that are not referenced. Instead of trying to survey every paper, we describe the HRI story from multiple perspectives with an eye toward identifying themes that cross applications. The survey attempts to include papers that represent a fair cross section of the universities, government efforts, industry labs, and countries that contribute to HRI, and a cross section of the disciplines that contribute to the field, such as human, factors, robotics, cognitive psychology, and design.

/pdf/human-robot-interaction-a-survey-4q8yi606a9.pdf

Human-Robot Interaction: A Survey

Purpose




The service sector is at an inflection point with regard to productivity gains and service industrialization similar to the industrial revolution in manufacturing that started in the eighteenth century. Robotics in combination with rapidly improving technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), mobile, cloud, big data and biometrics will bring opportunities for a wide range of innovations that have the potential to dramatically change service industries. The purpose of this paper is to explore the potential role service robots will play in the future and to advance a research agenda for service researchers.




Design/methodology/approach




This paper uses a conceptual approach that is rooted in the service, robotics and AI literature.




Findings




The contribution of this paper is threefold. First, it provides a definition of service robots, describes their key attributes, contrasts their features and capabilities with those of frontline employees, and provides an understanding for which types of service tasks robots will dominate and where humans will dominate. Second, this paper examines consumer perceptions, beliefs and behaviors as related to service robots, and advances the service robot acceptance model. Third, it provides an overview of the ethical questions surrounding robot-delivered services at the individual, market and societal level.




Practical implications




This paper helps service organizations and their management, service robot innovators, programmers and developers, and policymakers better understand the implications of a ubiquitous deployment of service robots.




Originality/value




This is the first conceptual paper that systematically examines key dimensions of robot-delivered frontline service and explores how these will differ in the future.

/pdf/brave-new-world-service-robots-in-the-frontline-2kekpw54f1.pdf

Brave new world: service robots in the frontline

This paper defines the research area of socially assistive robotics, focusing on assisting people through social interaction. While much attention has been paid to robots that provide assistance to people through physical contact (which we call contact assistive robotics), and to robots that entertain through social interaction (social interactive robotics), so far there is no clear definition of socially assistive robotics. We summarize active social assistive research projects and classify them by target populations, application domains, and interaction methods. While distinguishing these from socially interactive robotics endeavors, we discuss challenges and opportunities that are specific to the growing field of socially assistive robotics.

/pdf/defining-socially-assistive-robotics-2rsn9zwz3o.pdf

Defining socially assistive robotics

The past four years have seen the rise of conversational agents (CAs) in everyday life. Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Facebook have all embedded proprietary CAs within their software and, increasingly, conversation is becoming a key mode of human-computer interaction. Whilst we have long been familiar with the notion of computers that speak, the investigative concern within HCI has been upon multimodality rather than dialogue alone, and there is no sense of how such interfaces are used in everyday life. This paper reports the findings of interviews with 14 users of CAs in an effort to understand the current interactional factors affecting everyday use. We find user expectations dramatically out of step with the operation of the systems, particularly in terms of known machine intelligence, system capability and goals. Using Norman's 'gulfs of execution and evaluation' [30] we consider the implications of these findings for the design of future systems.

/pdf/like-having-a-really-bad-pa-the-gulf-between-user-3jl39tt7wd.pdf

"Like Having a Really Bad PA": The Gulf between User Expectation and Experience of Conversational Agents

http://manmachine.org/brd/publications/duffy-anthropomorphismSocialRobots.pdf

Anthropomorphism and the social robot

Virtual agents are traditionally constrained in their embodiment, as they are restricted to one form of body. We propose allowing them to change their embodiment in order to expand their capabilities. This presents users with a number of difficulties in maintaining the identity of the agents, but these can be overcome by using identity cues, certain features that remain constant across embodiment forms. This paper outlines an experiment that examines these identity cues, and shows that they can be used to help address this identity problem.

/pdf/maintaining-the-identity-of-dynamically-embodied-agents-1fo21ajcpq.pdf

Maintaining the identity of dynamically embodied agents

Agent Chameleons provides virtual agents powered by real intelligence, delivering next generation autonomic entities that can seamlessly migrate, mutate and evolve on their journey between and within physical and digital information spaces.

/pdf/agent-chameleons-virtual-agents-real-intelligence-13etlnh5v6.pdf

Agent Chameleons: Virtual Agents Real Intelligence

This paper details a framework for explicit deliberative control of socially and physically situated agents in virtual, real and mixed reality environments. The objective is to blur the traditional boundaries between the real and the virtual and provide a standardized methodology for intelligent agent control specifically designed for social interaction. The architecture presented in this paper embraces the fusion between deliberative social reasoning mechanisms and explicit tangible behavioural mechanisms for human-agent social interaction.

Social situated agents in virtual, real and mixed reality environments

Purpose – In investing energy in developing reasoning machines of the future, one must abstract away from the specific solutions to specific problems and ask what are the fundamental research questions that should be addressed. This paper aims to revisit some fundamental perspectives and promote new approaches to reasoning machines and their associated form and function.Design/methodology/approach – Core aspects are discussed, namely the one‐mind‐many‐bodies metaphor as introduced in the agent Chameleon work. Within this metaphor the agent's embodiment form may take many guises with the artificial mind or agent potentially exhibiting a nomadic existence opportunistically migrating between a myriad of instantiated embodiments. The paper animates these concepts with reference to two case studies.Findings – The two case studies illustrate how a machine can have fundamentally different capabilities than a human which allows us to exploit, rather than be constrained, by these important differences.Originality/...

/pdf/future-reasoning-machines-mind-and-body-1cquzvq88o.pdf

Brian R. Duffy

Papers

Anthropomorphism and the social robot

Maintaining the identity of dynamically embodied agents

Agent Chameleons: Virtual Agents Real Intelligence

Social situated agents in virtual, real and mixed reality environments

Future reasoning machines: mind and body