Creating robotic characters for long-term interaction

[摘要] Researchers studying ways in which humans and robots interact in social settings have a problem: they don;;t have a robot to use. There is a need for a socially expressive robot that can be deployed outside of a laboratory and support remote operation and data collection. This work aims to fill that need with DragonBot - a platform for social robotics specifically designed for long-term interactions. This thesis is divided into two parts. The first part describes the design and implementation of the hardware, software, and aesthetics of the DragonBot-based characters. Through the use of a mobile phone as the robot;;s primary computational device, we aim to drive down the hardware cost and increase the availability of robots ;;in the wild;;. The second part of this work takes an initial step towards evaluating DragonBot;;s effectiveness through interactions with children. We describe two different teleoperation interfaces for allowing a human to control DragonBot;;s behavior differing amounts of autonomy by the robot. A human subject study was conducted and these interfaces were compared through a sticker sharing task between the robot and children aged four to seven. Our results show that when a human operator is able to focus on the social portions of an interaction and the robot is given more autonomy, children treat the character more like a peer. This is indicated by the fact that more children re-engaged the robot with the higher level of autonomy when they were asked to split up stickers between the two participants.

[发布机构] Massachusetts Institute of Technology