Alexandra Bejarano

• Colorado School of Mines

For human operators to effectively task teams of robots, it is critical that they maintain situational awareness about the status of those robots. However, maintaining this situational awareness becomes particularly difficult when there are dynamic changes not only in the members of the robot team, but also in the capabilities of those robots. Prio...

To critically analyze and adapt to the risks and benefits of social robotics, future user communities will require technology and AI literacy: the ability to use new robotic technologies, understand their strengths and limitations, and critically evaluate the implications of their use. Research shows that collaborative, creative, and informal learn...

Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) is one of the most widely used experimental methodologies across the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), making WoZ teleoperation interfaces a critical tool for HRI research. Yet current WoZ teleoperation interfaces are overwhelmingly tailored towards a narrow set of HRI interaction paradigms. In this work, we conducted a set...

Understanding what influences human trust in robots is critical to avoid mistrust, distrust, and overtrust in human-robot interactions. However, the non-humanlike nature of robot identity in multi-robot systems can complicate how humans conceptualize robots and the nature of human-robot trust. Prior work by Williams et al. explored this complexity...

End-user development (EUD) in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) aims to expand access and applicability of robotics by allowing people with minimal robotics expertise to use and benefit from robots. To develop these systems, HRI researchers often rely on human-centered design methods that focus on the robot user. These design methods justifiably center...

The Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) method is a common and beneficial means of enabling researchers with control over robots in experimental settings. However, there is a lack of general robot control tools for WoZ that are publicly available and easily adaptable to various research domains and needs. In particular, existing control interfaces that may be used...

Human interactions with robot groups are more complex than interactions with individual robots. This is especially true for groups of robots that do not have humanlike 1-1 associations between bodies and identities, such as when multiple robots share a single identity. This is further complicated by the lack of direct observability of the relations...

Recent advances in HRI have begun to unravel the longstanding, implicit assumption that a given robot has a single, coherent, and unchanging body and identity. In doing so, these recent advances call into question conversational robots' traditional means of representing and reasoning about who is speaking and who is being spoken to. This provides n...

Children are stakeholders of robotic technologies who deserve to have their voices heard in the design process just as much as adult stakeholders. This is especially true for robotic technologies explicitly designed for child-robot interaction, in areas like education, healthcare, and therapy. Researchers face the challenge of cultivating children'...

Research has shown how the connections between robots' minds, bodies, and identities can be configured and performed in a variety of ways. In this work, we consider group identity observables: the set of design cues that robot groups use to perform different identity configurations. We explore how group identity observables lead observers to develo...

We describe a mixed-methods approach toward the design and evaluation of social robots that can offer emotional support for children in long-term care environments. Based on the results of a needfinding interview with a local expert, our specific aim was to design a robot that would be perceived as empathetic. An online human-subject study (n = 26)...

We describe a mixed-methods approach toward the design and evaluation of social robots that can offer emotional support for children in long-term care environments. Based on the results of a needfind-ing interview with a local expert, our specific aim was to design a robot that would be perceived as empathetic. An online human-subject study (n=26)...

In this article, we reflect on this concept of (robot) social identity performance and its importance in HRI, identifying a number of discussion points and further research questions relating to these under-explored topics. We further question whether we HRI practitioners can go beyond risk avoidance and instead actively leverage robot identity per...

This paper explores (1) how robots and multi-robot systems can perform identity specifically for human benefit, (2) the factors that impact how humans perceive robot identity and its connection with mind and body, and (3) possible implications of designing non-traditional identity configurations. In particular, we explore the unique ways that ident...

End-user (non-professional) programmers often opportunistically create programs, they evaluate various alternatives and reuse existing code by merging components from it or modifying it to suit the context or problems of their programs. Finding and evaluating which program variants to reuse code from is challenging because the searching mechanisms...

In this work we explore the relationship between mind, body, and identity in multi-robot distributed systems. Specifically, we explore how robot designers can adapt robots to selectively perform identities, and the effects this may have on human-robot trust, especially with respect to the novel concepts of trust localization, dissociation, and frag...

In this paper we describe a proposed integration between the DIARC robot cognitive architecture and the NASA Astrobee robot to enable goal-directed cognition and natural language control over this platform. After describing the capabilities of both architectures, we describe how the architectures can be integrated and provide examples of capabiliti...