Persuasive Robots - Exploring Behavioural Styles

Context

Social robots are foreseen to be encountered in our everyday life, playing roles as assistant or companion (to mention a few). Recent studies have shown the potential harmful impacts of overtrust in social robotics [1], as robots may collect sensitive information without the user’s knowledge.

Behavioural styles allow robots to express themselves differently within the same context. Given a specific gesture, keyframe manipulation can be used in order to generate style-based variation to the gesture. Behavioural styles have been studied in the past to improve robot’s behaviour during human-robot interaction [2].

In this project, we will explore how behavioural styles can influence engagement, trust and persuasion during human-robot interaction.

Goals & Milestones

• Implement behavioural styles for the Nao robot (voice and behaviour) and for a voice assistant (voice only)
• Design at least two behaviour styles based on human behaviour and personality styles
• Evaluate and compare these styles via experimentation
• Design a scenario similar to the one described in paper [3]
• Setup a data collection environment (posture, video and audio) in the HRI Lab facility of UNSW
• Select appropriate tasks and/or questionnaires to measure engagement, trust and/or persuasion
• Evaluate the system via an experiment with users
• Complete the data analysis

Topics

Robotics, HRI, Psychology

Prerequisites

• Skills: Python, ROS and Git.

References

• [1]https://media.kasperskycontenthub.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/43/2019/10/14081257/Robots_social_impact_eng.pdf
• [2] Johal, W., Pesty, S., & Calvary, G. (2014, August). Towards companion robots behaving with style. In The 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (pp. 1063-1068). IEEE.
• [3] Bainbridge, W. A., Hart, J. W., Kim, E. S., & Scassellati, B. (2011). The benefits of interactions with physically present robots over video-displayed agents. International Journal of Social Robotics, 3(1), 41-52.
• [4] Peters, R., Broekens, J., Li, K., & Neerincx, M. A. (2019, July). Robot Dominance Expression Through Parameter-based Behaviour Modulation. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM International Conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (pp. 224-226). ACM.
• [5] Shane Saunderson et al. It Would Make Me Happy if You Used My Guess: Comparing Robot Persuasive Strategies in Social Human–Robot Interaction, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2019). DOI: 10.1109/LRA.2019.2897143