There are a multitude of robotic application domains that touch on the field of human-robot interaction (HRI). From modern manufacturing involving human-robot teams, to personal care robots assisting the elderly, the roles that robots are being tasked with and the nature of interactions with humans are constantly shifting. Even the nature of interaction has changed to incorporate wearable technologies such as exoskeletons to enhance human capabilities, and advanced prosthetics to restore those abilities that have been lost. With this ever-evolving spectrum of HRI, the capacity of measurement science to evaluate, assess, and assure performance and safety struggles to keep up. Building on our previous five-workshop series on Test Methods and Metrics for Effective HRI, NIST presents a new series on evaluative methodologies for accelerating the pipeline from cutting-edge HRI research to state-of-practice. This workshop will address issues regarding 1) data collection and reporting for replicability and system validation, 2) test design and execution for performance verification, and 3) cross-modality artifact design for real-world application-adjacent technology transfer. The goal of this workshop is to accelerate and accommodate accessibility to HRI research results, and address the specific key performance indicators that would establish end-user trust and acceptance of emerging HRI technologies.

In an interdisciplinary and evolving research field like human-robot interaction, clear and precise results reporting is essential for study comparability and replicability. To address the lack of a standard for such reporting and, at the same time, provide guidance for novices in the field, we have developed a web-based reporting form to capture human-robot interaction studies, serving as a model for how conferences could adopt it into the submission pipeline. In this work, we present a formative evaluation of this form regarding its level of detail, format and clarity, and the perceived benefits for authors, reviewers, and the community as a whole. We report the expert review of nine researchers who highlight the substantial value of this tool. In addition, these experts also provide suggestions for improvements to its form and the addition of details surrounding qualitative reporting.

In public and social spaces shared by humans and robots, it is essential for both parties to be aware of each other’s goals and to communicate their intentions effectively. This work in progress aims to develop a motion planner that not only finds the shortest path to a goal while adhering to social norms and spatial constraints but also generates communicative gestures and movements, such as hesitations or prompting motions. Extensive datasets are required to teach robots socially compliant navigation and effective communication with their human counterparts. Here, we outline our data collection efforts to train such a planner and to inform the broader community about potential interactions between humans and robots in these scenarios. The primary goal of this research is to establish a foundation for user-centered design of interaction strategies and avoidance mechanisms during social navigation.

While research in multi-party spoken conversation with intelligent embodied agents has made significant progress in sub-tasks like speaker identification and non-verbal cues, there’s a gap in fully autonomous applications users can directly interact with. This lack translates to the absence of a standard methodology for evaluating multi-party conversational speech agents that considers both task-based system performance and user experience.

Angus Addlesee, Weronika Sieińska, Nancie Gunson, Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Christian Dondrup, Oliver Lemon. Proceedings of the 24th Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. 2023.

Possible applications for Social Robots in health-care settings, that could have a tremendous social impact in helping alleviating staff workload, are those of a patient-facing role such as robot receptionist, providing assistance to patients and visitors. Examples of functions that such robots would need to be able to execute are greeting visitors, reception check-in/out of patients, answering common questions they may have, showing them where to sit, helping them locate missing objects, providing directions to facilities, guiding them to different locations, etc. In this paper we describe current progress towards developing a multimodal conversational AI system integrated in a Social Conversational Robot (an ARI robot) that will act as a receptionist in a hospital waiting room. We present the developed architecture of the system and report on an initial experimental validation study carried out in laboratory conditions with the ARI robot.

Nancie Gunson, Daniel Hernandez Garcia, Weronika Sieińska, Angus Addlesee, Christian Dondrup, Oliver Lemon, Jose L. Part, Yanchao Yu. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue. 2022.

We will demonstrate a prototype multimodal conversational AI system that will act as a receptionist in a hospital waiting room, combining visually-grounded dialogue with social conversation. The system supports visual object conversation in the waiting room (e.g. looking for available seats or personal belongings), task-based dialogues regarding navigation and check-in procedures in the hospital, as well as access to the latest news, and a quiz game about coronavirus. The prototype system therefore demonstrates how to weave together a wide range of natural, daily conversations with end users that vary in complexity; from complex visual dialogue to chitchat and quiz games, to task-oriented domain-specific conversations. We are currently able to demonstrate the system via a web-based interface. It will soon be deployed on the ARI robot in a hospital waiting room.

With the global population aging at an alarming rate, the need to find alternative ways to deliver quality assistance is becoming a pressing concern for health and care systems. To promptly provide companion-like assistance, robots need to gain social intelligence in an autonomous way, without relying on human operators. The work described in this paper aims to develop a deep learning agent that, by means of convolutional neural network architecture in the decision making loop, could understand when and how, to interact with one, or more people, gathered in a room. This was done by training a robot to assess the level of user engagement at the initiation of the interaction, so that the robot could detect the person most willing to start interacting. The robot's performance as a deep learning agent was tested through an experiment with potential ''end-users'', following an iterative process, over four days. The deep learning agent was able to take the right decision 59% of the times by the end of the experiment, from an initial success rate of 44% on the first day, proving the potential of such technologies in this application field.

The Social Robots in Therapy workshop series aims at advancing research topics related to the use of robots in the contexts of Social Care and Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT). Robots in social care and therapy have been a long time promise in HRI as they have the opportunity to improve patients life significantly. Multiple challenges have to be addressed for this, such as building platforms that work in proximity with patients, therapists and health-care professionals; understanding user needs; developing adaptive and autonomous robot interactions; and addressing ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population. The full-day workshop follows last year's edition which centered on how social robots can improve health-care interventions, how increasing the degree of autonomy of the robots might affect therapies, and how to overcome the ethical challenges inherent to the use of robot assisted technologies. This 2ndedition of the workshop will be focused on the importance of equipping social robots with socio-emotional intelligence and the ability to perform meaningful and personalized interactions. This workshop aims to bring together researchers and industry experts in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Machine Learning and Robots in Health and Social Care. It will be an opportunity for all to share and discuss ideas, strategies and findings to guide the design and development of robot-assisted systems for therapy and social care implementations that can provide personalize, natural, engaging and autonomous interactions with patients (and health-care providers).

This video illustrates the large-scale experiment of the L2TOR project that will be presented at the HRI 2019 conference. The experiment aimed to investigate how 192 Dutch 5-year-old children could learn 34 English words from a NAO robot in 7 lessons. The experiment compared 4 conditions: 1) robot using iconic gestures, 2) robot without iconic gestures, 3) tablet only, and 4) a control group. The results revealed that children could learn more English words in all experimental conditions compared to the control group. The three experimental conditions did not show any significant differences regarding the learning outcomes.

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added benefit of a robot's iconic gestures on word learning and retention, and 3) the effect of learning from a robot tutor accompanied by a tablet versus learning from a tablet application alone. For reasons of transparency, the research questions, hypotheses and methods were preregistered. With a sample size of 194 children, our study was statistically well-powered. Our findings demonstrate that children are able to acquire and retain English vocabulary words taught by a robot tutor to a similar extent as when they are taught by a tablet application. In addition, we found no beneficial effect of a robot's iconic gestures on learning gains.

We conducted a study with 25 children to investigate the effectiveness of a robot measuring and encouraging production of spatial concepts in a second language compared to a human experimenter. Productive vocabulary is often not measured in second language learning, due to the difficulty of both learning and assessing productive learning gains. We hypothesized that a robot peer may help assessing productive vocabulary. Previous studies on foreign language learning have found that robots can help to reduce language anxiety, leading to improved results. In our study we found that a robot is able to reach a similar performance to the experimenter in getting children to produce, despite the person's advantages in social ability, and discuss the extent to which a robot may be suitable for this task.

Two different configurations of Liquid State Machine (LSM), a special type of Reservoir Computing with internal nodes modelled as spiking neurons, implementing multiple columns (Modular and Monolithic approaches) are tested against the decimation of neurons, connections and entire columns in order to verify which one can better withstand the damage. Based on the neurorobotics outlook, this work is part of a bigger project that aims to apply artificial neural networks to the control of humanoid robots. Therefore, as a benchmark, we made use of a robotic task where an LSM is trained to generate the joint angles needed to command a simulated version of the collaborative robot BAXTER to draw a square on top of a table. The final drawn shape is analysed through Dynamical Time Warping to generate a cost value based on how close the produced drawing is to the original shape. Our results show both approaches, Modular and Monolithic, had a similar behaviour, however the Modular was better at withstanding the decimation of neurons when it was concentrated in a single column.