Markus Häring

Creation and Evaluation of emotion expression with body movement, sound and eye color for humanoid robots

The ability to display emotions is a key feature in human communication and also for robots that are expected to interact with humans in social environments. For expressions based on Body Movement and other signals than facial expressions, like Sound, no common grounds have been established so far. Based on psychological research on human expression of emotions and perception of emotional stimuli we created eight different expressional designs for the emotions Anger, Sadness, Fear and Joy, consisting of Body Movements, Sounds and Eye Colors. In a large pre-test we evaluated the recognition ratios for the different expressional designs. In our main experiment we separated the expressional designs into their single cues (Body Movement, Sound, Eye Color) and evaluated their expressivity. The detailed view at the perception of our expressional cues, allowed us to evaluate the appropriateness of the stimuli, check our implementations for flaws and build a basis for systematical revision. Our analysis revealed that almost all Body Movements were appropriate for their target emotion and that some of our Sounds need a revision. Eye Colors could be identified as an unreliable component for emotional expression.

User-defined body gestures for navigational control of a humanoid robot

This paper presents a study that allows users to define intuitive gestures to navigate a humanoid robot. For eleven navigational commands, 385 gestures, performed by 35 participants, were analyzed. The results of the study reveal user-defined gesture sets for both novice users and expert users. In addition, we present, a taxonomy of the user-defined gesture sets, agreement scores for the gesture sets, time performances of the gesture motions, and present implications to the design of the robot control, with a focus on recognition and user interfaces.

Keep an Eye on the Task! How Gender Typicality of Tasks Influence Human–Robot Interactions

In an experiment, we tested whether the gender typicality of a human–robot interaction (HRI) task would affect the users’ performance during HRI and the users’ evaluation, acceptance and anthropomorphism of the robot.

Studies on grounding with gaze and pointing gestures in human-robot-interaction

N = 73

Modeling Gaze mechanisms for grounding in HRI

N=73 participants (38 females and 35 males) performed either a stereotypically male or a stereotypically female task while being instructed by either a ‘male’ or a ‘female’ robot. Results revealed that gender typicality of the task significantly affected our dependent measures: More errors occurred when participants collaborated with the robot in the context of a stereotypically female work domain. Moreover, when participants performed a typically female task with the robot they were less willing to accept help from the robot in a future task and they anthropomorphized the robot to a lower extent. These effects were independent of robot and participant gender. Our findings demonstrate that the gender typicality of HRI tasks substantially influences HRI as well as humans’ perceptions and acceptance of a robot.

Investigating the influence of culture on proxemic behaviors for humanoid robots

We present the design of a cast of pedagogical agents impersonating different educational roles in an interactive virtual learning environment. Teams of those agents are used to create different learning scenarios in order to provide learners with an engaging and motivating learning experience. Authors can employ an easy to use multimodal dialog authoring tool to adapt lecture and dialog content as well as interaction management to meet their respective requirements.

A Framework for User-Defined Body Gestures to Control a Humanoid Robot

In this study we investigated the use of gaze and pointing gestures in scenarios where a human has to follow the instructions of a humanoid robot. Our objective was to analyze the performance of a human participant, that solves an abstract jigsaw puzzle with the help of our robot instructor, in different grounding scenarios with varying difficulty. Furthermore we investigated how the attitude towards the robot and the self-assessment of the participant changed. Our results support that adding gaze to the interaction usually improves the interaction, but often additional pointing gestures are needed to make a significant difference.

Keep an eye on the task! how gender typicality of tasks influence human---robot interactions

In the present experiment, we investigated how robots’ social category membership and characteristics of an HRI task affect humans’ evaluative and behavioral reactions toward robots. Participants (N = 38) played a card game together with two robots, one belonging to participants’ social in-group and the other one being a social out-group member. Furthermore, participants were either asked to cooperate with the in- and to compete with the out-group robot (congruent condition), or they were asked to cooperate with the out-group robot while competing with the in-group robot (incongruent condition). The results largely support our hypotheses: Participants showed more positive evaluative reactions toward the in-group (vs. the out-group) robot and they anthropomorphized it more strongly, independent of the congruency or incongruence of the HRI. Moreover, if required, participants cooperated with both the in- and the out-group robot, whereas their cooperativeness was more pronounced toward the in-group robot. Finally, participants indicated more difficulties with the HRI in the incongruent vs. the congruent condition. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings ar discussed.