Barbara Kühnlenz

• Prof. Dr.
• Professor at Coburg University of Applied Sciences & Arts

This paper presents results from a study on the impact of negative attitudes towards robots on pedestrians’ needs for technological communication capabilities of autonomous vehicles and preferred communication modalities. Further, the amount of prior information on autonomous vehicles given to test persons is varied. The study is realized in terms...

This paper presents results from a video-based study on the impact of prior information on the user experience dimensions perceived intelligence, subjective performance, and trust in autonomous driving. A simulated autonomous driving situation is presented to test participants, while they are given different prior information in terms of descriptio...

This paper presents results from a study on the perception of robot attributes by human observers in their peripheral field of view depending on types of eye-movements of the latter. A between-subjects design is used, where a picture of a robot head is presented on a screen in the peripheral field of view of the participants with two conditions of...

Full text available at: https://rdcu.be/cdxnT. The evaluation of how (human) individuals perceive robots is a central issue to better understand Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). On this topic, promising proposals have emerged. However, present tools are not able to assess a sufficient part of the composite psychological dimensions involved in the eva...

This paper is a first step towards the investigation of civil courage in human-robot interaction (HRI). The main research question is if human users would help a robot being bullied by other humans. Previous work showed that pro-social behavior can be induced in human users towards a robot pro-actively asking for their help in order to accomplish a...

Results from a study on human gaze behavior during a synchronous human-robot arm movement task with incongruent motions and robot appearance variation are presented. Significant interactions of human gaze behavior and robot appearance (presence or absence of a robot head) towards deviations of human hand movements from task direction are found. De...

This paper investigates the effect of motor interference in human arm motions performed in close vicinity to robot arm motions and resulting workload. Human and robot perform congruent (parallel) and incongruent (orthogonal) motions in front of each other and hand positions are recorded through an optical tracking system. The experimental results s...

This paper investigates the progression of human hand trajectory variabilities during a pick-and-place task. A user study is conducted and human hand positions are tracked optically. Standard deviations of human hand positions over all trajectories within a trial are computed point-wise orthogonally to the direct path between start and goal positio...

This paper presents a dialog switching strategy for information retrieval in human–robot dialog in order to cope with different intensities of background noise. The strategy dynamically switches between a more open and a closed dialog scheme based on a continuously adapted confidence score evaluating resulting numbers of cases of recognition and no...

Emotional adaptation increases pro-social behavior of humans towards robotic interaction partners. Social cues are an important factor in this context. This work investigates, if emotional adaptation still works under absence of human-like facial Action Units. A human-robot dialog scenario is chosen using NAO pretending to work for a supermarket an...

The impact of different trajectory embodiments in terms of velocity profiles on mental stress in close human-robot interaction is investigated. A cooperative assembly scenario is chosen using a standard industrial robot. Conditions are implemented in a within-subjects design comparing linear with trapezoidal trajectories. Heart rate variability and...

This work investigates the impact of simply keeping eye-contact on users’ perceptions of the humanoid robot NAO during the carry and handover phases of a fetch-and-handover scenario. Two conditions of NAO looking either towards its planned path or towards the human test subject’s face are implemented in a within-subjects design. Evaluations of user...

Industrie 4.0 ist weit mehr als ein buzzword mit schwieriger Semantik. Diese Begrifflichkeit umschreibt eine revolutionäre Bewegung, deren vielfältige Facetten nahezu alle Bereiche unseres Denkens und Handelns erfassen. Um diesem Charakteristikum gerecht zu werden, verbindet dieser interdisziplinäre Sammelband die technische Evolution des Zeitalter...

In this paper we present the results of a preliminary study conducted to investigate the acceptance of a robotic shopping assistant among elderly people. The results show that most participants acclaim the development of assistive robots.

In the context of workplace health promotion, this paper investigates the impact of various industrial robot trajectory profiles on physiological responses as well as subjective performance in a user study with a cooperative human-robot interaction task. It is found, that minimum-jerk trajectories are superior to conventional or even avoidance beha...

Zusammenfassung Das Projekt Interactive Urban Robot (IURO) erforscht Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion und autonome Robotik in innerstädtischer Umgebung. In dem beleuchteten Szenario ist der Roboter auf Routenanweisungen von Passanten angewiesen, die er in natürlichsprachlichem Dialog und multimodaler Interaktion erwirbt. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf de...

In this article, we present the user-centered development of the service robot IURO. IURO’s goal is to find the way to a designated place in town without any previous map knowledge, just by retrieving information from asking pedestrians for directions. We present the 3-years development process,which involved a series of studies on its appearance,...

Our paper reports about an online study on robot facial expressions. On the one hand, we performed this study to assess the quality of the current facial expressions of two robot heads. On the other hand, we aimed at developing a simple, easy-to-use methodological variation to evaluate facial expressions of robotic heads. Short movie clips of two d...

This article describes an emotional adaption approach to proactively trigger increased helpfulness towards a robot in task-related human-robot interaction (HRI). Based on social-psychological predictions of human behavior, the approach aims at inducing empathy, paired with a feeling of similarity in human users towards the robot. This is achieved b...

This paper describes a new methodological approach and robot system to trigger more prosocial human reactions towards a robot by transferring social-psychological principles from human-human interaction to human-robot interaction (HRI). The main idea is to trigger increased helpfulness by proactively creating similarity through dynamic emotional ad...

It is the aim of our research to explore how multimodal feedback can help a robot to carry out itinerary requests effectively and satisfactory for a human interaction partner. We conducted two studies to evaluate the feedback setup of the Interactive Urban Robot (IURO), which navigates through public space autonomously and finds its way by asking p...

This paper describes the transfer of theories on prosocial behavior from Social Psychology to human-robot interaction (HRI) in terms of helpfulness shown by humans towards a robot. Theoretical foundations are given, and relevant influence factors for prosocial behavior are defined. The paper provides an overview on how these factors can be transfer...

This work is a first step towards an integration ofmultimodality with the aim to make efficient use of both human-like, and non-human-like feedback modalities in order to optimize proactive information retrieval from task-related Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in human environments. The presented approach combines the human-like modalities speech an...

As communication quality in public spaces often is impaired by noisy environment, it is difficult for a robot to retrieve missing task-information from humans. In this paper, different dialog strategies are modeled and evaluated with respect to user experience and error handling capabilities in HRI in order to cope with erroneous speech recognition...

In this paper, the impact of facial expressions on HRI is explored. To determine their influence on empathy of a human towards a robot and perceived subjective performance, an experimental setup is created, in which participants engage in a dialog with the robot head EDDIE. The web-based gaming application “Akinator” serves as a backbone for the di...

In this paper, an approach is presented that allows a robot to navigate in an urban environment by following natural language route instructions. In this situation, neither maps nor GPS information are available to the robot thus it has to rely solely on the human-given route description and the observations from its sensors. An architecture for so...

This paper investigates proactive task-related Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in human environments. The presented approach eventually aims for multi-modality by combining speech, gesture, and emotional facial mimicry. A first step is to focus on exploring the potentials and limitations of each modality in order to enable a robot to control a dialog...

This paper presents a first theoretical framework for a dialog strategy handling miscommunication in natural language Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). On the one hand the dialog strategy is deduced from findings about human-human communication patterns and coping strategies for miscommunication. On the other hand, relevant cognitive theories concerni...

Robots that are to assist humans in flexible and versatile ways, will not always possess all the information required to ful-fill their task. Therefore robotic systems have to be able to retrieve information through natural language communication with humans. Natural language is often vague or ambiguous and thus hard to in-terpret by technical syst...