Anara Sandygulova

Real-time adaptive child-robot interaction: Age and gender determination of children based on 3D body metrics

Service robots employed in public spaces need to be equipped with specific sensing, reasoning and human-robot interaction capabilities to adapt their interaction style and thus effectively engage with a variety of users. In this paper we present a method used by an ubiquitous robotic system to gather 3D body metrics and use them to robustly estimate age and gender of previously unseen participants in real-world multi-party situations. We evaluate systems performance on 428 children volunteers and compare them with those obtainable with a state of the art software based on face analysis. This work demonstrates that even small number of biometrics can achieve good age and gender estimation results in perceptually challenging environments. Finally, this paper illustrates how the system is used to inform the online adaptation of the behavior of a humanoid robot.

Investigating the impact of gender development in child-robot interaction

In order to inform the design of robotic applications for children, in this paper we describe and report the results of an experiment we conducted in a primary school. Our work investigates the effects of the robots perceived gender and age on levels of engagement and acceptance of the robot by children across different age and gender groups. Our results show that children across ages relate differently toward perceived robots age and gender.

Immersive human-robot interaction

Networked robotic applications enable robots to operate in distant, hazardous, or otherwise inaccessible environments, such as search and rescue, surveillance, and exploration applications. The most difficult challenge which persists for such systems is that of supporting effective human-robot interaction, as this usually demands managing dynamic views, changeable interaction modalities, and adaptive levels of robotic autonomy. In contrast of sophisticated screen-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs), the solution proposed herein is to enable more natural human-robot interaction modalities through a networked immersive user interface. This paper describes the creation of one such shared space where to test such an approach, with both simulated and real robots.

Investigating the Impact of Gender Segregation within Observational Pretend Play Interaction

This paper presents an observational study conducted at the public environment investigating childrens engagement with a social robot within a pretend play scenario. A pretend play system was designed in order to address the challenges of evaluating child-robot interaction by exploiting the advantages of ubiquitous robotics and ambient intelligence of multimodal, multi-sensory perception. The system performed successfully at a childrens play centre where a humanoid NAO robot was able to dynamically adapt its gender by changing its gendered voice to match the gender of the child. By analyzing the free play of children, the results obtained confirm the hypothesis of gender segregation within child-robot interaction. These findings are important and ought to be considered when designing robotic applications for children in order to increase robots perceived likeability, acceptance and engagement.

Children’s Perception of Synthesized Voice: Robot’s Gender, Age and Accent

This paper presents a study of children’s responses to the perceived gender and age of a humanoid robot Nao that communicated with four genuine synthesized child voices. This research investigates children’s preferences for an English accent. Results indicate that manipulations of robot’s age and gender are successful for all voice conditions, however some voices are preferred over the others by children in Ireland.

A study of effective social cues within ubiquitous robotics

Ubiquitous computing is the execution of computational tasks through everyday objects. Ubiquitous robotics augments the capabilities of one or more robots by leveraging ubiquitous computational and/or sensorial resources. Augmentation complements and/or enhances the capabilities of one or more robots while such robots can simultaneously serve as intermediaries or social interfaces to ubiquitous services. This paper posits the importance of conducting user studies to validate related HRI results within ubiquitous robotics. Specifically, the paper presents a pilot study designed to test the effectiveness of acknowledging human presence via non-verbal social cues and its impact on the users acceptance and engagement with a ubiquitous robotic system.

Learning with or from the Robot: Exploring Robot Roles in Educational Context with Children

The goal of this ongoing research is to examine the feasibility of using a social humanoid robot to teach children the basics of programming. We focus on exploring robot’s adaptive strategies in order to facilitate both effective educational applications and engaging child-robot interaction. In this paper we present our preliminary work, which explores robot’s social roles (peer versus teacher) and their effect on learning. The child needs to learn the basics of programming in order to walk the robot through the maze via drag-and-drop instructions on the tablet screen. The findings suggest that children complete the task much quicker with the peer robot while a teacher robot is shown to be more effective for learning.

Evaluating Peer Versus Teacher Robot within Educational Scenario of Programming Learning

This research explores the concept of edutainment where the basics of programming are introduced to children while playing a game with a social humanoid robot. The goal of the game is to exit the maze: the child is asked by the robot to make the robot walk the maze to its exit. The child needs to learn the basics of programming to walk through the maze via drag-and-drop instructions on the tablet screen. This paper presents an HRI study which aims to investigate what role of the robot (peer vs. teacher) would result in more learning gains in this particular application. The findings suggest that children complete the task much quicker with the peer robot while a teacher robot is shown to be more effective for learning.

You Win, I Lose: Towards Adapting Robot's Teaching Strategy

This paper presents a study that aims to address the challenges of creating effective educational robots. To this end, we developed a social educational robot which acts as a peer that is also a learner of a foreign language rather than a tutor teaching it. Children engage in a game with a peer robot which is programmed to either always win or always lose. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether children would learn more if they were winning or losing the game to the robot. The conducted study compares childrens responses and childrens improvements of English vocabulary after a game with the robot. Results indicate that children improve their English after playing with the robot, however which depends on the robots adapting strategy.

PRIveT - a portable ubiquitous robotics testbed for adaptive human-robot interaction

Ubiquitous robots are robots integrated with smart environments, where they cooperate with networks of heteroge- neous sensors to achieve complex tasks. Their successful application opens important research questions for both their engi- neering and their interaction with human users, especially in public space scenarios, when they need to interact in a socially acceptable manner with multiple and previously unknown people. This article presents a testbed, named PRIveT, which is pur- posefully designed to support effective human-robot interaction (HRI) in public spaces. The PRIveT testbed consists of an ubiq- uitous robotic system that is able to autonomously engage and adapt to its users. This article describes the design rationale of the PRIveT testbed and its technical features, and presents four research studies that have used the testbed extensively. Reflections on the testbed features that were important in these studies and lessons learnt are also discussed. An assessment of the PRIveT testbed in terms of utility of the design for human-robot interaction experiments concludes the paper.