Modeling and Controlling Friendliness for An Interactive Museum Robot

Abstract

Abstract-Advances in robotic technologies have enabled interactive robots to utilize humanlike social behaviors to interact with people in public places such as museums. While these behaviors have shown promise in engaging people, they have been designed and applied to users uniformly. Humans, however, behave differently according to their relationships with others. Behavioral changes, from neutral to friendly, contribute to the development of interpersonal relationships. Friendliness, in particular, plays an important role in the early development of a relationship. In this work, we explore how an interactive robot might nonverbally express a variety of friendly behaviors in a museum scenario. Four behavioral variables-response time, approach speed, individual distance, and attentiveness-contributing to perceived friendliness were modeled and implemented for the interactive museum robot. The results of our study showed that people perceived the differences in the designed robot behaviors and related those differences to the friendliness of the robot to varying degrees. This work serves as a building block toward the development of human-robot relationships and has implications on designing friendly behaviors for interactive robots.

Human-Like Guide Robot that Proactively Explains Exhibits

“…Regarding nonverbal behaviors, the proximity (social distance) between a user and a robot changes over time [19]. A model adjusts the proximity and spatial configuration to express different levels of friendliness [24]. Previous studies applied relation-building behaviors in daily contexts, such as an exercise coach [21], direction giving [7], and an office supporter [23].…”

“…11). A previous report [24] argued that visibility is critical for deciding the waiting location. That is, when an attendant wishes to show warmth, she remains visible to the visitor; in contrast, for low friendliness, she remains inconspicuous.…”

“…We applied a friendliness model of non-verbal behavior [24] to the approach behaviors. For new visitors, the robot slowly approaches at a relatively remote social distance (2.2 m).…”

Beyond R2D2

“…Recent studies performed with humanoid tour guide robots focused on the evaluation of singledout robot behavior, meaning the copy of only one specific behavior to communicate something, such as human-like gaze behavior [77], pointing behavior [6], and orientation behavior [48]. Findings showed that people recognized and responded naturally to the singled-out humanlike behavior the robot performed [6,36,48,77]. This seems to be an argument for identifying effective singled-out behaviors from people and translating these one-to-one to robots.…”

Multivariate evaluation of interactive robot systems

“…Advances in robotic technology are enabling the development of robot systems that interact with humans in a wide range of applications, including education (Tanaka et al 2007;Szafir and Mutlu 2012), storytelling (Mutlu et al 2006;Ham et al 2011), museum guidance (Huang et al 2014), coaching in weight loss and exercise (Kidd 2008;Fasola and Mataric 2012), and collaborative work (Foster et al 2009;Huang and Mutlu 2012;Salem et al 2012). In such interactions, robot systems employ a wide range of behaviors including elements of spoken and nonverbal language to improve how effectively they support these applications and their users' experiences.…”