Filipa Correia

Just follow the suit! Trust in human-robot interactions during card game playing

Robots are currently being developed to enter our lives and interact with us in different tasks. For humans to be able to have a positive experience of interaction with such robots, they need to trust them to some degree. In this paper, we present the development and evaluation of a social robot that was created to play a card game with humans, playing the role of a partner and opponent. This type of activity is especially important, since our target group is elderly people - a population that often suffers from social isolation. Moreover, the card game scenario can lead to the development of interesting trust dynamics during the interaction, in which the human that partners with the robot needs to trust it in order to succeed and win the game. The design of the robots behavior and game dynamics was inspired in previous user-centered design studies in which elderly people played the same game. Our evaluation results show that the levels of trust differ according to the previous knowledge that players have of their partners. Thus, humans seem to significantly increase their trust level towards a robot they already know, whilst maintaining the same level of trust in a human that they also previously knew. Henceforth, this paper shows that trust is a multifaceted construct that develops differently for humans and robots.

Friends or Foes?: Socioemotional Support and Gaze Behaviors in Mixed Groups of Humans and Robots

This study investigated non-verbal behavior and socioemotional interactions in small-groups of humans and robots. Sixty-participants were involved in a group setting in which they were required to play a card game with another human and two robots (playing as partners or as opponents). The two robots displayed different goal orientations: a competitive robot (named Emys-) and a relationship-driven cooperative robot (named Glin+). Video recordings of the interactions were analyzed in three game play sessions. Eye gaze and socioemotional support behaviors were coded based on Bales» Interaction Process Analysis. Results indicated that gaze behavior towards partners was more frequently displayed to the relationship-driven robot than to the competitive robot and the human partners. In contrast, gaze towards opponents occurred more often towards the competitive robot than to the relationship-driven robot and the human opponents. Socioemotional support occurred more frequently towards partners than opponents, and was also displayed more often towards humans than towards robots. Moreover, in the sessions where the robots were opponents, participants provided more support to the competitive robot. This investigation in small groups of humans and robots provided evidence of different interaction patterns towards robots displaying distinct orientation goals, which can be useful in guiding the successful design of social robots.

Group-based Emotions in Teams of Humans and Robots

Providing social robots an internal model of emotions can help them guide their behaviour in a more humane manner by simulating the ability to feel empathy towards others. Furthermore, the growing interest in creating robots that are capable of collaborating with other humans in team settings provides an opportunity to explore another side of human emotion, namely, group-based emotions. This paper contributes with the first model on group-based emotions in social robotic partners. We defined a model of group-based emotions for social robots that allowed us to create two distinct robotic characters that express either individual or group-based emotions. This paper also contributes with a user study where two autonomous robots embedded the previous characters, and formed two human-robot teams to play a competitive game. Our results showed that participants perceived the robot that expresses group-based emotions as more likeable and attributed higher levels of group identification and group trust towards their teams, when compared to the robotic partner that expresses individual-based emotions.

Building a Social Robot as a Game Companion in a Card Game

In this video we present a social robotic player that is able to play a traditional card game in a social manner. The interaction takes place in a rich environment in which two teams of two players each compete to win the card game. Therefore, the robotic game player has a partner, and an opponent team of two other players. During each game, the robot explores both competitiveness with the opponent team and cooperation with its partner, conciliating the performance of players and the social dynamics that emerge during the game-play.

Groups of humans and robots: Understanding membership preferences and team formation

Although groups of robots are expected to interact with groups of humans in the near future, research related to teams of humans and robots still appears scarce. This paper contributes to the study of human-robot teams by investigating how humans choose robots to partner with in a multi-party game context. The novelty of our work concerns the successful design and development of two social robots that are able to autonomously interact with a group of two humans in the execution of a social and entertaining task. The development of these two characters was motivated by psychological research on learning goal theory, according to which we interpret and approach a given task differently depending on our learning goal (oriented more towards either relationship building or competition). Thus, we developed two robotic characters implemented in two robots: Emys (competitive robot) and Glin (relationship-driven robot). In our study, a group of four (two humans and two autonomous robots) engaged in a social and entertaining card game. Our study yields several important conclusions regarding groups of humans and robots. (1) When a partner is chosen without previous partnering experience, people tend to prefer robots with relationship-driven characteristics as their partners compared with competitive robots. (2) After some partnering experience has been gained, the choice becomes less clear and additional driving factors emerge: (2a) participants with higher levels of competitiveness (personal characteristics) tend to prefer Emys, whereas those with lower levels prefer Glin, and (2b) the choice of which robot to partner with also depends on team performance, with the winning team being the preferred choice.