This paper investigates the efficacy of a tactile and haptic human robot interface developed and trialled to aid navigation in poor visibility and audibility conditions, which occur, for example, in search and rescue. The new developed interface generates haptic directional information that will support human navigation when other senses are not or only partially accessible. The central question of this paper was whether humans are able to interpret haptic signals as denoting different spatial directions. The effectiveness of the haptic signals was measured in a novel experimental set up. Participants were given a stick (replicating the robot interface) and asked to reproduce the specific spatial information denoted by each of the haptic signals. The task performance was examined quantitatively and results show that the haptic signals can denote distinguishable spatial directions, supporting the hypothesis that tactile and haptic information can be effectively used to aid human navigation.

Social robots are being developed as a form of social skills training for individual's with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). Effective training will therefore require the social signals produced by a robot to be contingent with people's knowledge and expectations of social cognition and behaviour. Designing recognisable facial expressions is an important part of this challenge; ensuring interactions are more believable and motivating. This design process requires - amongst other factors - consideration of how culture and native language affects social signal processing. In this experiment participants offered a full-bodied robot (named 'Alyx') food items to which Alyx reacted autonomously, producing either an approving or disapproving expression. Participant's responded to these expressions (i.e. the robots social signals) by indicating whether Alyx liked or disliked the food. Task performance was examined both quantitatively (response time and accuracy) and qualitatively (participant's reactionary expressions). The results revealed significant cultural differences, as non-native English speakers were less accurate at interpreting expressions, but also a similar response trend between these groups. Qualitative analysis supported the notion that Alyx's expressions were not universally understood. These findings are discussed in the context of social skills training.

This paper outlines a demonstration of the work carried out in the SoCoRo project investigating how far a neuro-typical population recognises facial expressions on a non-naturalistic robot face that are designed to show approval and disapproval. RFID-tagged objects are presented to an Emys robot head (called Alyx) and Alyx reacts to each with a facial expression. Participants are asked to put the object in a box marked 'Like' or 'Dislike'. This study is being extended to include assessment of participants' Autism Quotient using a validated questionnaire as a step towards using a robot to help train high-functioning adults with an Autism Spectrum Disorder in social signal recognition.

Search and rescue operations are often undertaken in smoke filled and noisy environments in which rescue teams must rely on haptic feedback for navigation and safe exit. In this paper, we discuss designing and evaluating a haptic interface to enable a human being to follow a robot through an environment with no-visibility. We first discuss the considerations that have led to our current interface design. The second part of the paper describes our testing procedure and the results of our first tests. Based on these results we discuss future improvements of our design.