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International Journal of Social Robotics

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02-06-2016

Towards Engagement Models that Consider Individual Factors in HRI: On the Relation of Extroversion and Negative Attitude Towards Robots to Gaze and Speech During a Human–Robot Assembly Task

Experiments with the iCub humanoid

Authors: Serena Ivaldi, Sebastien Lefort, Jan Peters, Mohamed Chetouani, Joelle Provasi, Elisabetta Zibetti

Published in: International Journal of Social Robotics | Issue 1/2017

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Abstract

Estimating the engagement is critical for human–robot interaction. Engagement measures typically rely on the dynamics of the social signals exchanged by the partners, especially speech and gaze. However, the dynamics of these signals are likely to be influenced by individual and social factors, such as personality traits, as it is well documented that they critically influence how two humans interact with each other. Here, we assess the influence of two factors, namely extroversion and negative attitude toward robots, on speech and gaze during a cooperative task, where a human must physically manipulate a robot to assemble an object. We evaluate if the score of extroversion and negative attitude towards robots co-variate with the duration and frequency of gaze and speech cues. The experiments were carried out with the humanoid robot iCub and N = 56 adult participants. We found that the more people are extrovert, the more and longer they tend to talk with the robot; and the more people have a negative attitude towards robots, the less they will look at the robot face and the more they will look at the robot hands where the assembly and the contacts occur. Our results confirm and provide evidence that the engagement models classically used in human–robot interaction should take into account attitudes and personality traits.

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In social psychology, there is a net distinction between personality traits and attitudes. Here, we use methods from differential psychology rather than social psychology: the distinction between the two is not important, as long as the two factors are two characteristics of the individual that are evaluated at a certain time prior to the interaction. We measured the attitude towards robots with the NARS questionnaire, a test that was created to capture the projected anxiety of the person before its interaction with the robot. We used it to evaluate an individual attitude prior to the direct interaction with the robot (participants filled the NARS questionnaire several days before the experiment—see details about the experimental procedure in Sect. 4.4).

See for example the press article: “Will workplace robots cost more jobs than they create?” http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-27995372.

We interviewed our participants after the experiments. Some reported that they “do not like robots because they are going to take our jobs”. Some reported to have enjoyed the experiment with the robot and made explicit reference to their expectations being influenced by “the robots of Star Wars”.

In social psychology, there is a net distinction personality traits and attitudes. Here, we use methods from differential psychology rather than social psychology. We measured the attitude towards robots with the NARS questionnaire, a test that was created to capture the projected anxiety of the person before its interaction with the robot. We used it to evaluate an individual attitude prior to the direct interaction with the robot (participants filled the NARS questionnaire several days before the experiment—see details about the experimental procedure in Sect. 4.4).

http://www.loria.fr/~sivaldi/edhhi.htm.

We cannot report the questions, as the questionnaire is not publicly available: we refer the interested reader to the English manual [12] and the official French adaptation that we used [13].

A recent paper from Dinet and Vivian [16] studied the NARS and validated it on a sample of French population. Their study was published only after our work and experiments. They employed their own translation of the questionnaire, which has some slight differences with ours, mostly due to some nuances of the French language. These do not preserve the original meaning when translated back into English. In their paper there is no mention of a double translation mechanism for validating the French adaptation of the questionnaire.

This was done as a safety measure. However, nothing happened during the experiments: the experimenter never had to push the safety button, and she never had to stop the physical interaction between the robot and the subject.

It is a dissemination video from IIT showing the iCub, available on Youtube: http://youtu.be/ZcTwO2dpX8A.

In the post-experiment interview, we asked the participants if they thought or had the impression that the robot was controlled by someone: all the participants thought that the robot was fully autonomous.

The demonstration was also part of the safety measures required by the Ethics Committee to approve our protocol.

The operator could switch the control mode without the need of the verbal command, since he had a direct visibility of the interaction zone in front of the robot through an additional camera that was centered on the workspace in front of the robot (see Fig. 2).

Utterances are units of speech that begin and end by a pause. To determine the beginning and the end of each utterance, we consider pauses greater than 500ms.

Correlation is frequently used to study the link between personality and behavior, as discussed in [18], a survey on the link between extroversion and behavior where all the cited studies use correlations to test their hypothesis.

According to the NEO-PIR, a participant obtaining a score bigger than 137 is considered extrovert, while one with a score below 80 is introvert.

According to the NARS, a score over 65 is a sign of negative attitude towards robots, while a score below 35 indicates a rather positive attitude towards robots.

Contact forces are the forces due to the physical interaction between the human and the robot, originated at the contact location where the interaction occurs.

See download instructions at http://eris.liralab.it/wiki/UPMC_iCub_project/MACSi_Software.

https://github.com/robotology/icub-basic-demos/tree/master/demoForceControl.

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Title: Towards Engagement Models that Consider Individual Factors in HRI: On the Relation of Extroversion and Negative Attitude Towards Robots to Gaze and Speech During a Human–Robot Assembly Task
Experiments with the iCub humanoid
Authors: Serena Ivaldi
Sebastien Lefort
Jan Peters
Mohamed Chetouani
Joelle Provasi
Elisabetta Zibetti
Publication date: 02-06-2016
Publisher: Springer Netherlands
Published in: International Journal of Social Robotics / Issue 1/2017
Print ISSN: 1875-4791
Electronic ISSN: 1875-4805
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-016-0357-8

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