Tatsuya Nomura

Experimental investigation into influence of negative attitudes toward robots on human–robot interaction

Negative attitudes toward robots are considered as one of the psychological factors preventing humans from interacting with robots in the daily life. To verify their influence on humans‘ behaviors toward robots, we designed and executed experiments where subjects interacted with Robovie, which is being developed as a platform for research on the possibility of communication robots. This paper reports and discusses the results of these experiments on correlation between subjects’ negative attitudes and their behaviors toward robots. Moreover, it discusses influences of gender and experience of real robots on their negative attitudes and behaviors toward robots.

The influence of people’s culture and prior experiences with Aibo on their attitude towards robots

This paper presents a cross-cultural study on peoples’ negative attitude toward robots. 467 participants from seven different countries filled in the negative attitude towards robots scale survey which consists of 14 questions in three clusters: attitude towards the interaction with robots, attitude towards social influence of robots and attitude towards emotions in interaction with robots. Around one half of them were recruited at local universities and the other half was approached through Aibo online communities. The participants’ cultural background had a significant influence on their attitude and the Japanese were not as positive as stereotypically assumed. The US participants had the most positive attitude, while participants from Mexico had the most negative attitude. The participants from the online community were more positive towards robots than those not involved. Previous experience in interacting with Aibo also had a positive effect, but owning an Aibo did not improve their attitude.

Prediction of Human Behavior in Human--Robot Interaction Using Psychological Scales for Anxiety and Negative Attitudes Toward Robots

When people interact with communication robots in daily life, their attitudes and emotions toward the robots affect their behavior. From the perspective of robotics design, we need to investigate the influences of these attitudes and emotions on human-robot interaction. This paper reports our empirical study on the relationships between peoples attitudes and emotions, and their behavior toward a robot. In particular, we focused on negative attitudes, anxiety, and communication avoidance behavior, which have important implications for robotics design. For this purpose, we used two psychological scales that we had developed: negative attitudes toward robots scale (NARS) and robot anxiety scale (RAS). In the experiment, subjects and a humanoid robot are engaged in simple interactions including scenes of meeting, greeting, self-disclosure, and physical contact. Experimental results indicated that there is a relationship between negative attitudes and emotions, and communication avoidance behavior. A gender effect was also suggested.

Measurement of Anxiety toward Robots

To study the short-term and long-term influence of communication robots in daily life applications, it is necessary to develop psychological scales for measuring the mental states of users of robots and analyzing related social trends. In particular, to explore the more internal factors related to communication robots, it is necessary to focus on anxiety. This paper reports the results of developing the Robot Anxiety Scale (RAS) for measuring the anxiety that prevents individuals from interaction with robots having functions of communication in daily life. In particular, we focus on communication in a human-robot dyad

Analysis of People Trajectories with Ubiquitous Sensors in a Science Museum

This paper reports a study that estimated visitor positions, visiting patterns, and inter-human relationships at a science museum using information from RFID readers. In the science museum, we exhibited humanoid robots. Visitors were invited to wear RFID tags to interact with the robots. Visitor behavior was simultaneously observed using 20 RFID readers, distributed throughout the entire floor, that roughly measured the distances of nearby tags. We integrated the outputs from all RFID readers to estimate visitor trajectories that were used to analyze three perspectives: space, visiting patterns, and relationships. Regarding space, we identified crowded and uncrowded areas. We found several typical visiting patterns, such as visited at every exhibit and directly going to robot area. We also identified atypical visiting behavior. Regarding relationships, for example, we estimated 68% coverage of group-member relationships with 91% reliability.

Psychology in human-robot communication: an attempt through investigation of negative attitudes and anxiety toward robots

In order to study short-term and long-term influence of communication robots in daily-life applications, it is necessary to develop psychological scales measuring mental states of users of robots and social trends on them. This paper focuses on negative attitudes and anxiety toward robots, and shows results obtained through development of scales measuring them.

An Analysis of Two-Parent Recombinations for Real-Valued Chromosomes in an Infinite Population

This paper concerns recombinations which produce offspring from two parents. We assume an infinite population and regard recombinations as transformations of stochastic variables represented as chromosomes. We then formalize recombinations with the probability density functions of stochastic variables represented as the parameters and describe the change of the probability density functions of chromosomes before and after recombination. Our formalization includes various proposed recombinations, such as multi-point, uniform, and linear crossover, as well as BLX-. We also derive certain properties of the operators, such as diversification and decorrelation.

An adaptive rule extraction with the fuzzy self-organizing map and a comparison with other methods

For automatic rule extraction from a set of input-output data examples, decision tree generating methods such as ID3 and fuzzy ID3 play a major role. These methods, however, are difficult to apply when there is a tendency for the examples to change dynamically. This paper presents a new method for adaptive rule extraction with the fuzzy self-organizing map and the results of simulations in order to present its effectiveness by a comparison with other methods such as RBF (radial basis functions) and GA (genetic algorithms). We obtained the result that our method is superior to other methods for automatic and adaptive rule extraction.

Examining the frankenstein syndrome: an open-ended cross-cultural survey

This paper reports findings from an open-ended survey on attitudes towards humanoid robots collected from samples in the United Kingdom and Japan. 335 participants were asked how they felt about humanoid robots becoming widespread in society and what tasks they wanted humanoid robots to perform. While the UK sample was overall less negative towards humanoid robots than their Japanese counterparts, the UK sample did not want robots to perform tasks that required capabilities deemed as human qualities, such as empathy, caring, or independent decision making.

Comparison on Identification of Affective Body Motions by Robots Between Elder People and University Students: A Case Study in Japan

Expressive behaviors based on body motions are one of the useful methods that social robots present their emotional states toward users. On the other hand, some psychological research found age dependence on emotion identification in human facial expressions. In order to investigate this dependence in affective body expressions of robots, a psychological experiment was conducted in Japan, by using a small-sized humanoid robot on which three types of affective motion expression (anger, sadness, and pleasure) were implemented. The results of the experiment, which consisted of seventeen university student subjects and fifteen elder subjects, showed differences between younger and elder subjects on emotion identification, body parts paid attention to, and impressions of motion speed and magnitude for these affective body motions of the robot. Moreover, the results suggested correlations between the accuracy of emotion identification and cognitive bias to the robot’s specific body motion parts. Based on these results, the paper discusses about some implications in human-robot interaction research.