Advances in robotics and multisensory displays allow extending telepresence ambitions beyond only the feeling of being present at a remote location In this paper, we discuss what may lie beyond telepresence and how we can transport both the functional and social self of a user. We introduce the embodiment illusion and its potential contribution to task performance and list important cues to evoke this illusion, including synchronicity in multisensory information, a first-person visual perspective, and a human-like visual appearance and anatomy of the telepresence robot. We also introduce the concept of social presence and the important bidirectional social cues it needs, including eye contact, facial expression, posture, gestures, and social touch. For all these multisensory and social cues, we explain how they can be implemented in a telepresence system and describe our solution consisting of a closed control pod and a humanoid telepresence robot.

Conversation Fillers (CFs), such as ‘um’, ‘hmm’, and ‘ah’, may help to improve the human-robot interaction by smoothening the robot's responses. This paper presents the design and test of such CFs - alongside iconic pensive or acknowledging gestures - for Wizard of Oz (WoZ) controlled open-ended dialogues in child-robot interactions. A controlled experiment with 26 children showed that these CFs can improve the perceived speediness, aliveness, humanness, and likability of the robot, without decreasing perceptions of intelligence, trustworthiness, or autonomy.

In this contribution, we describe a method of analysing and interpreting the direction and timing of a human's gaze over time towards a robot whilst interacting. Based on annotated video recordings of the interactions, this post-hoc analysis can be used to determine how this gaze behaviour changes over the course of an interaction, following from the observation that humans change their behaviour towards the robot on the time-scale of individual interactions. We posit that given these circumstances, this measure may be used as a proxy (among others) for engagement in the interaction or the human's attribution of social agency to the robot. Application of this method to a sample of unstructured child-robot interactions demonstrates its use, and justifies its utilisation in future studies.

A field study was conducted in which CRI activities developed by the ALIZ-E project were tested with the project's primary user group: children with diabetes. This field study resulted in new insights in the modalities and roles a robot aimed at CRI in a healthcare setting might utilise, while in addition (re-)assessed some practises and technologies established within the project. Furthermore, it served as a means of strengthening the bonds with the project's principal stakeholders. The study illustrates on the one hand the feasibility of the activities that were developed within the project, while on the other hand highlights the importance of engaging with primary users in an ongoing, incremental fashion.

No abstract available.

ALIZ-E is a Europe-wide project focusing on long-term child-robot interaction, specifically as a means of educating diabetic children on their condition. This video showcases a recent field study at "SugarKidsClub", a camp devoted to helping 7-12 year-olds handle type-1 diabetes. A wide range of CRI activities developed by ALIZ-E were employed, including a large "SandTray" touch table running a tile-sorting game and a "Handshake" touch-inducing activity designed to strengthen the child-robot bond. Apart from helping kids with their unfortunate affliction, the day at "SugarKidsClub" provided us a chance to use new technologies developed for the aforementioned activities as well as furthering our relationship with our primary stakeholders. This playful video highlights some of the footage taken that day within an entertaining story centered on Charlie, one of the NAO robots used for our field study with a pension for battery theft.

This video is about a new kind of robotic head. Through back-projection of a computer generated video into a half-translucent mask, the LightHead robotic head has many advantages compared to tradition mechatronic robotic faces. These advantages are most notably the versatility and ease of controlling facial expressions and creating new faces, the total weight and the low costs. By mounting the head on a robotic arm and equipping it with face detection software, the robot can interact with people in a natural manner.

Reading gaze direction is important in human-robot interactions as it supports, among others, joint attention and non-linguistic interaction. While most previous work focuses on implementing gaze direction reading on the robot, little is known about how the human partner in a human-robot interaction is able to read gaze direction from a robot. The purpose of this paper is twofold: (1) to introduce a new technology to implement robotic face using retro-projected animated faces and (2) to test how well this technology supports gaze reading by humans. We briefly discuss the robot design and discuss parameters influencing the ability to read gaze direction. We present an experiment assessing the user's ability to read gaze direction for a selection of different robotic face designs, using an actual human face as baseline. Results indicate that it is hard to recreate human-human interaction performance. If the robot face is implemented as a semi sphere, performance is worst. While robot faces having a human-like physiognomy and, perhaps surprisingly, video projected on a flat screen perform equally well and seem to suggest that these are the good candidates to implement joint attention in HRI.

This paper presents a new implementation of a robot face using retro-projection of a video stream onto a semitransparent facial mask. The technology is contrasted against mechatronic robot faces, of which Kismet is a typical example, and android robot faces, as used on the Ishiguro robots. The paper highlights the strengths of Retro-projected Animated Faces (RAF) technology (with cost, flexibility and robustness being notably strong) and discusses potential developments.