To Örebro University

The aim of the study presented in this paper is to develop a quantitative evaluation tool of the sense of safety and security for robots in eldercare. By investigating the literature on measurement of safety and security in human-robot interaction, we propose new evaluation tools. These tools are semantic differential scale questionnaires. In experimental validation, we used the Pepper robot, programmed in the way to exhibit social behaviors, and constructed four experimental conditions varying the degree of the robot’s non-verbal behaviors from no gestures at all to full head and hand movements. The experimental results suggest that both questionnaires (for the sense of safety and the sense of security) have good internal consistency.

For many applications where interaction between robots and older people takes place, safety and security are key dimensions to consider. ‘Safety’ refers to a perceived threat of physical harm, whereas ‘security’ is a broad term which refers to many aspects related to health, well-being, and aging. This chapter presents a quantitative evaluation tool of the sense of safety and security for robots in elder care. By investigating the literature on measurement of safety and security in human–robot interaction, we propose new evaluation tools specially tailored to assess interaction between robots and older people.

Robot-assisted training, where social robots can be used as motivational coaches, provides an interesting application area. This paper examines how feedback given by a robot agent influences the various facets of participant experience in robot-assisted training. Specifically, we investigated the effects of feedback type on robot acceptance, sense of safety and security, attitude towards robots and task performance. In the experiment, 23 older participants performed basic arm exercises with a social robot as a guide and received feedback. Different feedback conditions were administered, such as flattering, positive and negative feedback. Our results suggest that the robot with flattering and positive feedback was appreciated by older people in general, even if the feedback did not necessarily correspond to objective measures such as performance. Participants in these groups felt better about the interaction and the robot.

Safety in human-robot interaction can be divided into physical safety and perceived safety, where the later is still under-addressed in the literature. Investigating perceived safety in human-robot interaction requires a multidisciplinary perspective. Indeed, perceived safety is often considered as being associated with several common factors studied in other disciplines, i.e., comfort, predictability, sense of control, and trust. In this paper, we investigated the relationship between these factors and perceived safety in human-robot interaction using subjective and objective measures. We conducted a two-by-five mixed-subjects design experiment. There were two between-subjects conditions: the faulty robot was experienced at the beginning or the end of the interaction. The five within-subjects conditions correspond to (1) baseline, and the manipulations of robot behaviors to stimulate: (2) discomfort, (3) decreased perceived safety, (4) decreased sense of control and (5) distrust. The idea of triggering a deprivation of these factors was motivated by the definition of safety in the literature where safety is often defined by the absence of it. Twenty-seven young adult participants took part in the experiments. Participants were asked to answer questionnaires that measure the manipulated factors after within-subjects conditions. Besides questionnaire data, we collected objective measures such as videos and physiological data. The questionnaire results show a correlation between comfort, sense of control, trust, and perceived safety. Since these factors are the main factors that influence perceived safety, they should be considered in human-robot interaction design decisions. We also discuss the effect of individual human characteristics (such as personality and gender) that they could be predictors of perceived safety. We used the physiological signal data and facial affect from videos for estimating perceived safety where participants’ subjective ratings were utilized as labels. The data from objective measures revealed that the prediction rate was higher from physiological signal data. This paper can play an important role in the goal of better understanding perceived safety in human-robot interaction.

This article surveys reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. Reinforcement learning is a framework for decision-making problems in which an agent interacts through trial-and-error with its environment to discover an optimal behavior. Since interaction is a key component in both reinforcement learning and social robotics, it can be a well-suited approach for real-world interactions with physically embodied social robots. The scope of the paper is focused particularly on studies that include social physical robots and real-world human-robot interactions with users. We present a thorough analysis of reinforcement learning approaches in social robotics. In addition to a survey, we categorize existent reinforcement learning approaches based on the used method and the design of the reward mechanisms. Moreover, since communication capability is a prominent feature of social robots, we discuss and group the papers based on the communication medium used for reward formulation. Considering the importance of designing the reward function, we also provide a categorization of the papers based on the nature of the reward. This categorization includes three major themes: interactive reinforcement learning, intrinsically motivated methods, and task performance-driven methods. The benefits and challenges of reinforcement learning in social robotics, evaluation methods of the papers regarding whether or not they use subjective and algorithmic measures, a discussion in the view of real-world reinforcement learning challenges and proposed solutions, the points that remain to be explored, including the approaches that have thus far received less attention is also given in the paper. Thus, this paper aims to become a starting point for researchers interested in using and applying reinforcement learning methods in this particular research field.