Believable Robot Characters

Abstract

Believability of characters has been an objective in literature, theater, film, and animation. We argue that believable robot characters are important in human-robot interaction, as well. In particular, we contend that believable characters evoke users’ social responses that, for some tasks, lead to more natural interactions and are associated with improved task performance. In a dialogue-capable robot, a key to such believability is the integration of a consistent storyline, verbal and nonverbal behaviors, and sociocultural context. We describe our work in this area and present empirical results from three robot receptionist testbeds that operate "in the wild."

Living with robots : investigating the user acceptance of social robots in domestic environments

“…People tend to ascribe a level of intelligence and sociability to robots which influences their perceptions of how the interaction should proceed. Robots capable of natural language dialog raise users' expectations not only with respect to the natural language, but also regarded to the intentionality of both verbal and nonverbal behaviors, the robot's autonomy, and its awareness of the sociocultural context (Simmons et al, 2011). It is likely that robots, which are enabled with sociable interaction features such as familiar humanlike gestures or facial expressions in their designs, will further encourage people to interact socially with them in a fundamentally unique way.…”

Interactive Drama With Robots for Teaching Non-Technical Subjects

“…A robot actor is never completely still, even when the actor is not on stage. Simmons et al (2011) propose the use of dramatic structure to create believable robot characters that engage and attract people to interact with, and exhibit social behaviors toward, the robots. Authors present several approaches to creating believable robot characters such as having a rich backstory and dynamic storyline, using verbal and nonverbal social behaviors, and incorporating sociocultural context into the robot's behaviors.…”

“…o Intensity of the current mood: Emotions are scaled by the intensity of the current mood (Simmons et al, 2011).…”

“…This effect decays over time, returning the robot actor to its "baseline" mood (Gockley et al, 2006;Simmons et al, 2011). Factors that affect the intensity and type of mood include the following:…”

“…For example, a positive social exchange with a character modulates a positive mood, while a negative one tends to reduce the positive mood (Simmons et al, 2011).…”