The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Funding information National Funds provided by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Grant/Award Numbers: UID/PSI/03125/2013, PTDC/EEI-SII/7174/2014, SFRH/BD/110223/2015, CIPPSI/04345/2013 Abstract The aim of this review was to examine the pros and cons of humanizing social robots following a psychological perspective. As such, we had six goals. First, we defined what social robots are. Second, we clarified the meaning of humanizing social robots. Third, we presented the theoretical backgrounds for promoting humanization. Fourth, we conducted a review of empirical results of the positive effects and the negative effects of humanization on human–robot interaction (HRI). Fifth, we presented some of the political and ethical problems raised by the humanization of social robots. Lastly, we discussed the overall effects of the humanization of robots in HRI and suggested new avenues of research and development.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/hbe2.147

Humanization of robots: Is it really such a good idea?

The influence of social cues in persuasive social robots on psychological reactance and compliance

Numerous researches have studied the development of robotics, especially socially assistive robots (SAR), including the NAO robot This small humanoid robot has a great potential in social assistance The NAO robot’s features and capabilities, such as motricity, functionality, and affective capacities, have been studied in various contexts The principal aim of this study is to gather every research that has been done using this robot to see how the NAO can be used and what could be its potential as a SAR Articles using the NAO in any situation were found searching PSYCHINFO, Computer and Applied Sciences Complete and ACM Digital Library databases The main inclusion criterion was that studies had to use the NAO robot Studies comparing it with other robots or intervention programs were also included Articles about technical improvements were excluded since they did not involve concrete utilisation of the NAO Also, duplicates and articles with an important lack of information on sample were excluded A total of 51 publications (1895 participants) were included in the review Six categories were defined: social interactions, affectivity, intervention, assisted teaching, mild cognitive impairment/dementia, and autism/intellectual disability A great majority of the findings are positive concerning the NAO robot Its multimodality makes it a SAR with potential

/pdf/socially-assistive-robots-the-specific-case-of-the-nao-3nylg94xk8.pdf

Socially assistive robots : the specific case of the NAO

This work explores the extent to which social dialogue can mitigate (or exacerbate) the loss of trust caused when robots make conversational errors. Our study uses a NAO robot programmed to persuade users to agree with its rankings on two tasks. We perform two manipulations: (1) The timing of conversational errors – the robot exhibited errors either in the first task, the second task, or neither; (2) The presence of social dialogue – between the two tasks, users either engaged in a social dialogue with the robot or completed a control task. We found that the timing of the errors matters: replicating previous research, conversational errors reduce the robot’s influence in the second task, but not on the first task. Social dialogue interacts with the timing of errors, acting as an intensifier: social dialogue helps the robot recover from prior errors, and actually boosts subsequent influence; but social dialogue backfires if it is followed by errors, because it extends the period of good performance, creating a stronger contrast effect with the subsequent errors. The design of social robots should therefore be more careful to avoid errors after periods of good performance than early on in a dialogue.

Getting to Know Each Other: The Role of Social Dialogue in Recovery from Errors in Social Robots

Security is one of the possible fields in human society in which robotics can be applied. Human guards usually perform a range of tasks in which a robot can provide help. A security company collaborated with us in the design and development of a robot that should serve in patrolling large indoor areas, interacting with humans, welcoming, providing information, and be a telepresence platform for the human security guards. In this paper we present a preliminary experiment which involved this new robot in two roles: security and guidance. The former being important especially during night, and the latter being common in daytime, when guards are usually interacting with people who ask them information. The results of the experiment with 55 participants showed how the perception of the appearance of the robot and its effectiveness are influenced by its behaviour and its related perceived more authoritative or kinder traits. These results provide useful indication for the employment of robot guards in a real world situation.

Security and guidance: Two roles for a humanoid robot in an interaction experiment

The use of robots as educational tools has demonstrated to be highly effective for attracting students to science and technology related academic fields. Although these academic fields are very important, we believe that other subjects such as language, music, arts, literature, history, etc., are also essential for future generations. For this reason, the goal of this research is to explore the potential use of robots as educational tools for non-technology related fields such as history. We discuss an alternative approach for designing robots inspired in traits and characteristics of historical figures that play an important role in the topic to be studied. We present some examples of conceptual designs of robots inspired in ancient gods of Mesoamerican and South American cultures. We discuss how some of the traits of ancient gods could serve as inspiration for the appearance design of commercial robots, and how these robots could be used in educational environments to attract the attention of students to learn about this history topic.

Educational Robots as Promotors of Cultural Development

The objective of this research is to investigate the personality factors that influence human decision-making in particular scenarios such as during the interaction with a robot or a human counterpart. We conducted the experiment in a public environment in which participants were approached by either a human or a robot agent. The agent asked a verbal request in a direct or indirect manner that participants could accept or decline. We used the Ten Item Personality Measure (TIPI) in order to measure the personality traits of the agent that had a strong influence in the acceptance decision of the participants. Our results suggest that within the context that our experiment took place, the humanoid robot was more effective at influencing human-decision making than the human agent, in particular when indirect request was used. The personality traits that made the robot to be more effective were: ‘extrovert’, ‘enthusiastic’ and ‘sympathetic’.

Influence of a Humanoid Robot in Human Decision-Making When Using Direct & Indirect Requests

The present work reports the development of intelligent software that permits to design gearboxes of cylindrical gears and welded housing with a high degree of automation. At the time there is a large amount of CAD software with options to design machine elements, but there is not any that focuses on the complete design of gearboxes. This is because a gearbox is a product of high complexity, in which many variables are involved and, at the same time, there are innumerable solutions for the same need. To overcome these difficulties, the authors have used the Artificial Intelligence technique known as Case Based Reasoning (CBR). The developed software has the characteristic modules of a case-based system: a base of resolved cases, a retrieve module and an adaptation module. The main advantage of this type of systems is that they manage to acquire the experience (knowledge) of the specialists and store it through the resolved cases. This experience is reused in the solution of new problems. During the research process it was necessary to define the main characteristics that describe a gearbox, i.e., its similarity attributes, as well as to establish the similarity function and implement a parametric adaptation technique. Additionally, the software has modules for calculating and selecting the components of a gearbox, to tune the design to meet the requirements established by technical standards or by a user. The implementation was done in Visual Basic language in the form of an add-in, which is automatically loaded into the Autodesk Inventor® environment. From the input data, the developed program, called aiGearboxDesigner, is capable of generating a complete design, 3D models and the corresponding assembly planes and manufacturing drawings.

Computational Tool for the Intelligent Design of Gearboxes of Cylindrical Gears and Welded Housing

The use of indirect language is considered useful for persuading people in human communication. The aim of this research is to determine whether this also occurs within human-robot interaction. Thus, it is hypothesized that indirect language will have greater influence in attitude changes towards a product in comparison to direct language. A seven-point semantic differential scale was employed to measure participants attitude changes towards a product advertised by a Nao Robot using either direct or indirect speech. Results showed no significant differences between the direct and indirect language experimental conditions. This may indicate that in human-robot interaction indirect language may not function similarly as it does in human communication. A larger sample size and improvements in stimuli are suggested for future works.

Effects of Using Indirect Language by a Robot to Change Human Attitudes

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