The Social Robots Project
Vikia: A Robot for
Social Interaction
1
Different Approaches to HumanRobot Interaction

Nonanthropomorphic
Easy to design, but hard to use

Anthropomorphic
Opposite problem


2
Continuum exists
between the two
Where is it best to
focus our efforts?
Social Interaction



3
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)
Goals of Social Robot Project

Vikia - a robotic
greeter / tour guide for
Newell Simon Hall
•
•

4
With a personality
That can obey social
conventions
Make interacting with
robots easy and
entertaining
Expressiveness


Drama provides models
for expressive behavior
without the effort of
“building a human”
Delsarte’s code of
expressions
–
5
French dramatist in
1800s, create perception
of emotion
Interaction



6
Gesture, expression, gaze and other nonverbal cues are important
Must have reasonable responses to
unexpected behavior
Must have predictable responses to normal
behavior
Related Work: Software Agents



7
REA (Justine Cassell)
- multimodal communication
Oz project (Reilly, Bates)
- interactive drama, character
design
Virtual Theater project
(Barbara Hayes-Roth)
- improvisation, character
design
Related Work: Robots



8
Kismet (Cynthia Breazeal)
- expression
Xavier (Yasushi Nakauchi)
- personal space
Nursebot
- natural language
communication, social
behavior
Background Work: Robot Improv




9
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
Background Work: Xavier




10
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
Vikia



Tracks people with laser range finder
Executes scripts based on perceptions
First experiment
•
•

11
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
Experimental Results





12
Setting: busy hallway
15 minute trial
50 people passed
6 stopped
4 answered Vikia’s question
Experimental Results




13
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
Next Steps



14
Integrating speech recognition, movement
Integrating vision-based people tracking
(Adrian Hilti)
Behavior recognition
Future Work



15
Emotional model
Plan-based approach to interaction
Learning of social conventions