An Introduction to MultiAgent Systems.

Cognitive engineering

All chapters of the previous edition [see HbA 37, 2103] have been completely rewritten to cover the rapid increase in research in this area. The number of literature citations have been reduced by referring to recent review articles and the book aims at a comprehensive and critical rather than encyclopaedic summary of the data of environmental chemistry. The 1st 4 chapters deal with air, water, rocks and soils; the cycling of C, N, H, O2 and S in the biosphere are covered in 1 chapter and the elemental Other CABI sites 

Environmental Chemistry of the Elements

Though substantial research has been dedicated towards using technology to improve education, no current methods are as effective as one-on-one tutoring. A critical, though relatively understudied, aspect of effective tutoring is modulating the student's affective state throughout the tutoring session in order to maximize long-term learning gains. We developed an integrated experimental paradigm in which children play a second-language learning game on a tablet, in collaboration with a fully autonomous social robotic learning companion. As part of the system, we measured children's valence and engagement via an automatic facial expression analysis system. These signals were combined into a reward signal that fed into the robot's affective reinforcement learning algorithm. Over several sessions, the robot played the game and personalized its motivational strategies (using verbal and non-verbal actions) to each student. We evaluated this system with 34 children in preschool classrooms for a duration of two months. We saw that (1) children learned new words from the repeated tutoring sessions, (2) the affective policy personalized to students over the duration of the study, and (3) students who interacted with a robot that personalized its affective feedback strategy showed a significant increase in valence, as compared to students who interacted with a non-personalizing robot. This integrated system of tablet-based educational content, affective sensing, affective policy learning, and an autonomous social robot holds great promise for a more comprehensive approach to personalized tutoring.

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Affective personalization of a social robot tutor for children's second language skills

Assistive free-flyers (AFFs) are an emerging robotic platform with unparalleled flight capabilities that appear uniquely suited to exploration, surveillance, inspection, and telepresence tasks. However, unconstrained aerial movements may make it difficult for colocated operators, collaborators, and observers to understand AFF intentions, potentially leading to difficulties understanding whether operator instructions are being executed properly or to safety concerns if future AFF motions are unknown or difficult to predict. To increase AFF usability when working in close proximity to users, we explore the design of natural and intuitive flight motions that may improve AFF abilities to communicate intent while simultaneously accomplishing task goals. We propose a formalism for representing AFF flight paths as a series of motion primitives and present two studies examining the effects of modifying the trajectories and velocities of these flight primitives based on natural motion principles. Our first study found that modified flight motions might allow AFFs to more effectively communicate intent and, in our second study, participants preferred interacting with an AFF that used a manipulated flight path, rated modified flight motions as more natural, and felt safer around an AFF with modified motion. Our proposed formalism and findings highlight the importance of robot motion in achieving effective human-robot interactions. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine Systems— human factors, software psychology; H.5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces— evaluation/ methodology, user-centered design General Terms Design, Human Factors

/pdf/communication-of-intent-in-assistive-free-flyers-qmnlctiemy.pdf

Communication of intent in assistive free flyers

This paper describes our approach on the development of the expression of emotions on a robot with constrained facial expressions. We adapted principles and practices of animation from Disney™ and other animators for robots, and applied them on the development of emotional expressions for the EMYS robot. Our work shows that applying animation principles to robots is beneficial for human understanding of the robots' emotions.

The illusion of robotic life: principles and practices of animation for robots

Robots are currently being developed to enter our lives and interact with us in different tasks. For humans to be able to have a positive experience of interaction with such robots, they need to trust them to some degree. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of a social robot that was created to play a card game with humans, playing the role of a partner and opponent. This type of activity is especially important, since our target group is elderly people - a population that often suffers from social isolation. Moreover, the card game scenario can lead to the development of interesting trust dynamics during the interaction, in which the human that partners with the robot needs to trust it in order to succeed and win the game. The design of the robot's behavior and game dynamics was inspired in previous user-centered design studies in which elderly people played the same game. Our evaluation results show that the levels of trust differ according to the previous knowledge that players have of their partners. Thus, humans seem to significantly increase their trust level towards a robot they already know, whilst maintaining the same level of trust in a human that they also previously knew. Henceforth, this paper shows that trust is a multifaceted construct that develops differently for humans and robots.

/pdf/just-follow-the-suit-trust-in-human-robot-interactions-29xgeutcfv.pdf

Just follow the suit! Trust in human-robot interactions during card game playing

Social robots are becoming increasingly diverse in their design, behavior, and usage. In this chapter, we provide a broad-ranging overview of the main characteristics that arise when one considers social robots and their interactions with humans. We specifically contribute a framework for characterizing social robots along seven dimensions that we found to be most relevant to their design. These dimensions are: appearance, social capabilities, purpose and application area, relational role, autonomy and intelligence, proximity, and temporal profile. Within each dimension, we account for the variety of social robots through a combination of classifications and/or explanations. Our framework builds on and goes beyond existing frameworks, such as classifications and taxonomies found in the literature. More specifically, it contributes to the unification, clarification, and extension of key concepts, drawing from a rich body of relevant literature. This chapter is meant to serve as a resource for researchers, designers, and developers within and outside the field of social robotics. It is intended to provide them with tools to better understand and position existing social robots, as well as to inform their future design.

An extended framework for characterizing social robots.

Emotion Modeling for Social Robots

In this paper we propose a methodology for the creation of social interaction strategies for human-robot interaction based on restricted-perception Wizard-of-Oz studies (WoZ). This novel experimental technique involves restricting the wizard's perceptions over the environment and the behaviors it controls according to the robot's inherent perceptual and acting limitations. Within our methodology, the robot's design lifecycle is divided into three consecutive phases, namely data collection, where we perform interaction studies to extract expert knowledge and interaction data; strategy extraction, where a hybrid strategy controller for the robot is learned based on the gathered data; strategy refinement, where the controller is iteratively evaluated and adjusted. We developed a fully-autonomous robotic tutor based on the proposed approach in the context of a collaborative learning scenario. The results of the evaluation study show that, by performing restricted-perception WoZ studies, our robots are able to engage in very natural and socially-aware interactions.

Tiago Ribeiro

Papers

The illusion of robotic life: principles and practices of animation for robots

Just follow the suit! Trust in human-robot interactions during card game playing

An extended framework for characterizing social robots.

Emotion Modeling for Social Robots

Discovering Social Interaction Strategies for Robots from Restricted-Perception Wizard-of-Oz Studies