Getting acquainted: First steps for child-robot relationship formation

In this article we discuss two studies of children getting acquainted with an autonomous socially assistive robot. The success of the first encounter is key for a sustainable long-term supportive relationship. We provide four validated behavior design elements that enable the robot to robustly get acquainted with the child. The first are five...

Memory-Based Personalization for Fostering a Long-Term Child-Robot Relationship

After the novelty effect wears off children need a new motivator to keep interacting with a social robot. Enabling children to build a relationship with the robot is the key for facilitating a sustainable long-term interaction. We designed a memory-based personalization strategy that safeguards the continuity between sessions and tailors the...

Interactive Education on Sleep Hygiene with a Social Robot at a Pediatric Oncology Outpatient Clinic: Feasibility, Experiences, and Preliminary Effectiveness

Objectives: Children with cancer often experience sleep problems, which are associated with many negative physical and psychological health outcomes, as well as with a lower quality of life. Therefore, interventions are strongly required to improve sleep in this population. We evaluated interactive education with respect to sleep hygiene with a...

Co-creation as a Facilitator for Co-regulation in Child-Robot Interaction

While interacting with a social robot, children have a need to express themselves and have their expressions acknowledged by the robot. A need that is often unaddressed by the robot, due to its limitations in understanding the expressions of children. To keep the child-robot interaction manageable the robot takes control, undermining children's...

Core Elements of Social Interaction for Constructive Human-Robot Interaction

We present a discovery-based, first version, explicit model of social interaction that provides a basis for measuring the quality of interaction of a human user with a social robot. The two core elements of the social interaction model are engagement and co-regulation. Engagement emphasizes the \textit{qualitative nature} of social interaction...

Design patterns for an interactive storytelling robot to support children's engagement and agency

In this paper we specify and validate three interaction design patterns for an interactive storytelling experience with an autonomous social robot. The patterns enable the child to make decisions about the story by talking with the robot, reenact parts of the story together with the robot, and recording self-made sound effects. The design...

Getting Acquainted for a Long-Term Child-Robot Interaction

We are developing a social robot that should autonomously interact long-term with pediatric oncology patients. The child and the robot need to get acquainted with one another before a long-term interaction can take place. We designed five interaction design patterns and two sets of robot behaviors to structure a getting acquainted interaction....

Enthusiastic Robots Make Better Contact

This paper presents the design and evaluation of human-like welcoming behaviors for a humanoid robot to draw the attention of passersby by following a three-step model: (1) selecting a target (person) to engage, (2) executing behaviors to draw the target's attention, and (3) monitoring the attentive response. A computer vision algorithm was...

On the effects of team size and communication load on the performance in exploration games

Exploration games are games where agents (or robots) need to search resources and retrieve these resources. In principle, performance in such games can be improved either by adding more agents or by exchanging more messages. However, both measures are not free of cost and it is important to be able to assess the trade-off between these costs and...

Ontology design for task allocation and management in urban search and rescue missions

Task allocation and management is crucial for human-robot collaboration in Urban Search And Rescue response efforts. The job of a mission team leader in managing tasks becomes complicated when adding multiple and different types of robots to the team. Therefore, to effectively accomplish mission objectives, shared situation awareness and task...

Exploring the ethical landscape of robot-assisted Search and Rescue

As robots are increasingly used in Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, it becomes highly relevant to study how SAR robots can be developed and deployed in a responsible way. In contrast to some other robot application domains, e.g. military and healthcare, the ethics of robot-assisted SAR are relatively under examined. This paper aims to fill this...

Specifying and testing the design rationale of social robots for behavior change in children

We are developing a social robot that helps children with diabetes Type 1 to acquire self-management skills and routines. There is a diversity of Behavior Change Techniques (BCTs) and guidelines that seem to be useful for the development of such support, but it is not yet clear how to work out the techniques into concrete robot support functions...

Ontological Reasoning for Human-Robot Teaming in Search and Rescue Missions

In search and rescue missions robots are used to help rescue workers in exploring the disaster site. Our research focuses on how multiple robots and rescuers act as a team, and build up situation awareness. We propose a multi-agent system where each agent supports one member, either human or robot. For representing high-level information about...

On the need for a coordination mechanism to guarantee task completion in a cooperative team

To design good cooperative team members in robotics it is important to know what coordination mechanisms are required. Our approach to explore the need for a coordination mechanism is based on a systematic methodology to identify team coordination requirements. We show that a team combined of robots that each individually can solve a task not...

Designing a Knowledge Representation Interface for Cognitive Agents

The design of cognitive agents involves a knowledge representation (KR) to formally represent and manipulate information relevant for that agent. In practice, agent programming frameworks are dedicated to a specific KR, limiting the use of other possible ones. In this paper we address the issue of creating a flexible choice for agent programmers...

How to Design and Test Interactive Robots