Robots are starting to be used in tasks involving human–robot interactions. For them to be efficient in these tasks, they must be seen as suitable interaction partners. One method to achieve this is to enable them to use proper verbal and non-verbal communication. Selecting non-verbal behaviours that appropriately complement the robot’s verbal messages is complex and requires roboticists to understand how each dimension of communication, as well as their combination, affects how the user perceives the message. In this work, we evaluated the effect of selecting appropriate non-verbal expressions given the robot’s speech on how users perceive the robot and its expressiveness. To do this, we conducted a within-subjects experiment where participants played cards with two robots — one that used a co-speech gesture prediction module for selecting its non-verbal expressions and another that used random expressions. The results showed that using the gestures predicted by our system improves the experience of participants during interactions. Specifically, participants perceived the robot using the co-speech gesture prediction module as having a higher level of agency, and as having a more coherent expressiveness. • We conducted a within-subjects that sought to evaluate how an appropriate selection of co-speech gestures has over how users perceive a social robot and its expressiveness. • Participants observed a researcher having a staged interaction with two robots, and then played a card game with them. • The addition of the co-speech gesture prediction module led to a statistically significant improvement in how users perceived the agency of a social robot. • The use of the gesture prediction module led to participants perceiving a higher coherence between the robot’s verbal and non-verbal communication when compared with a robot that uses random, neutral non-verbal gestures. • The gestures of the robot that used the co-speech gesture prediction module were perceived as being more expressive, although the differences were only marginally significant. These differences become significant among users 40 years old or younger.

Social robots are increasingly used in healthcare and education, but technological gaps, fears of human replacement, and moral or social beliefs can limit their acceptance. In collaborative settings, the activities to complete may influence users' willingness to participate, raising the question of how moral and social attitudes shape human-robot interaction. This paper studies the effect of the Social Judgement Theory on social robotics to analyse which factors affect the users' willingness to complete the robot's requests. The methodology classifies the activities requested by the robot into assimilation (activities people typically accept), non-commitment (activities people usually reject) and the contrast (activities some people accept) groups. We conducted a user study with 63 participants interacting with the Mini social robot in a collaborative session where it requested some actions from the user. We analyse whether the kind of activity requested by the robot, its expressiveness, and demographic, moral, social, and robot factors influence the user behaviour. Results show that the Social Judgement Theory can be extended to social robotics since the kind of activity affects the user's willingness to complete it. Besides, the results indicate that an expressive robot convinced users more than a non-expressive robot and that participants who lied about their completed activities were more easily persuaded. We also found that participants with moderate knowledge of robotics completed more activities than those with low knowledge, and individuals with previous experience interacting with Mini were more likely to comply with its requests. However, demographic factors such as age or gender do not seem to influence robot persuasion despite previous studies suggesting they are important in human-robot collaboration.

Affective feedback from social robots is a useful technique for communicating to people whether they are interacting “well” with the robot or not. However, some users, such as people with physical or cognitive difficulties, may not be able to interact in all the desired ways. In these cases, affective feedback from the robot could be excessively negative—an “unhappy” robot, leading to an unrewarding experience for the user. This article presents a motivation-based architecture for an autonomous multimodal social robot, that incorporates an affective feedback mechanism which generates an affective state by combining the internal needs of the robot and the social interaction quality. The balance between these two factors can dynamically change, allowing the robot to adapt its affective feedback to the user's interaction style and capabilities. We have implemented this architecture in a simulation and in a MiRo social robot, and report experiments examining the behavior of the system in interactions with different experimental user profiles. The results show that the adaptive mechanism allows the robot to change its affective feedback to give more positive encouragement to users than in non-adaptive cases.

Socially assistive robots in healthcare have reported positive results in recent years, for example, in reducing the impact of mild cognitive impairment in older adults. The lack of a qualified workforce and the increase in the older adult population in developed countries have encouraged designers to develop socially assistive robots that operate autonomously by bringing in cognitive and decision-making methods to facilitate the caregivers’ tasks, select the most appropriate activities, and personalize the interaction. This paper presents the development of a cognitive human-inspired decision-making system for autonomous social assistive robots managing the personalized selection of exercises in cognitive stimulation and providing affective support to their users. The decision-making system receives inputs from the robot’s perceptions, user information stored in the robot’s memory, events in an agenda, and information from a bio-inspired module. These inputs generate autonomous decisions that drive the robot’s behavior depending on each situation. We show the system’s capacity, integrated into our Mini social robot, to adapt the interaction, select tailored exercises based on the user’s features, and execute exercises previously programmed by a caregiver to alleviate cognitive deterioration and accompany older people. Besides, the system generates a natural robot behavior based on biologically inspired methods to personalize activities, engage the user, and increase the number of robot services.

Social robots coexist with humans in situations where they have to exhibit proper communication skills. Since users may have different features and communicative procedures, personalizing human–robot interactions is essential for the success of these interactions. This manuscript presents Active Learning based on computer vision and human–robot interaction for user recognition and profiling to personalize robot behavior. The system identifies people using Intel-face-detection-retail-004 and FaceNet for face recognition and obtains users’ information through interaction. The system aims to improve human–robot interaction by (i) using online learning to allow the robot to identify the users and (ii) retrieving users’ information to fill out their profiles and adapt the robot’s behavior. Since user information is necessary for adapting the robot for each interaction, we hypothesized that users would consider creating their profile by interacting with the robot more entertaining and easier than taking a survey. We validated our hypothesis with three scenarios: the participants completed their profiles using an online survey, by interacting with a dull robot, or with a cheerful robot. The results show that participants gave the cheerful robot a higher usability score (82.14/100 points), and they were more entertained while creating their profiles with the cheerful robot than in the other scenarios. Statistically significant differences in the usability were found between the scenarios using the robot and the scenario that involved the online survey. Finally, we show two scenarios in which the robot interacts with a known user and an unknown user to demonstrate how it adapts to the situation.

Adapting to dynamic environments is essential for artificial agents, especially those aiming to communicate with people interactively. In this context, a social robot that adapts its behaviour to different users and proactively suggests their favourite activities may produce a more successful interaction. In this work, we describe how the autonomous decision-making system embedded in our social robot Mini can produce a personalised interactive communication experience by considering the preferences of the user the robot interacts with. We compared the performance of Top Label as Class and Ranking by Pairwise Comparison, two promising algorithms in the area, to find the one that best predicts the user preferences. Although both algorithms provide robust results in preference prediction, we decided to integrate Ranking by Pairwise Comparison since it provides better estimations. The method proposed in this contribution allows the autonomous decision-making system of the robot to work on different modes, balancing activity exploration with the selection of the favourite entertaining activities. The operation of the preference learning system is shown in three real case studies where the decision-making system works differently depending on the user the robot is facing. Then, we conducted a human-robot interaction experiment to investigate whether the robot users perceive the personalised selection of activities more appropriate than selecting the activities at random. The results show how the study participants found the personalised activity selection more appropriate, improving their likeability towards the robot and how intelligent they perceive the system. query Please check the edit made in the article title.