Cindy L. Bethel

Mississippi State University | MSU · Department of Computer Science and Engineering

title>ABSTRACT The objective of this research was to survey and evaluate simulators for use with unmanned ground vehicles and extend the functionality of the ANVEL simulator to include the robot operating system (ROS). The goals of the research were first to determine how the ANVEL simulator would compare to four other currently available simulato...

title>ABSTRACT There is a need to better understand how operators and autonomous vehicle control systems can work together in order to provide the best-case scenario for utilization of autonomous capabilities in military missions to reduce crew sizes and thus reduce labor costs. The goal of this research is to determine how different levels of aut...

title>ABSTRACT To optimize the use of partially autonomous vehicles, it is necessary to develop an understanding of the interactions between these vehicles and their operators. This research investigates the relationship between level of partial autonomy and operator abilities using a web-based virtual reality study. In this study participants too...

Effective emotional communication can have benefits in social interactions between a user and a robot. By developing a tool that can pivot easily between distinct emotional states in response to user presence or input, we have applied a multi-modal method for implementing affect communication in everyday interactions. Our interactive tool engages w...

Deploying socially assistive robots (SARs) at home, such as robotic companion pets, can be useful for tracking behavioral and health-related changes in humans during lifestyle fluctuations over time, like those experienced during CoVID-19. However, a fundamental problem required when deploying autonomous agents such as SARs in people’s everyday liv...

Ten questions to guide reflection and assessment of the “good” in robotics projects are suggested.

Dataset available for download here: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp078

Socially-assistive robots (SARs) have significant potential to help manage chronic diseases (e.g. dementia, depression, diabetes) in spaces where people live, averse to clinic-based care. However, the challenge is designing SARs so that they perform appropriate interactions with people who have different characteristics, such as age, gender, and cu...

Dataset available for download here: https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.tb2rbp078

We conducted a long-term user study with 26 participants across two diverse locations (the United States and South Korea) with SARs deployed in each user’s home for several weeks. We collected robotic sensor data every second of every day, combined with sophisticated ecological momentary assessment (EMA) sampling techniques, to generate a large-sca...

Designing a socially therapeutic assistive robot (STAR) for use in mental healthcare is an emerging interdisciplinary process, for which there is a lack of comprehensive guidance and standards. This paper provides insight into the design and development process of the socially therapeutic assistive robotic dog, Therabot™. By outlining the project's...

Socially-assistive robots (SARs) hold significant potential to transform the management of chronic healthcare conditions (e.g. diabetes, Alzheimer’s, dementia) outside the clinic walls. However doing so entails embedding such autonomous robots into people’s daily lives and home living environments, which are deeply shaped by the cultural and geogra...

While most bullying researchers argue that any definition of bullying must include three core elements (power imbalance, intent to cause harm, and repetitive negative actions), relatively few researchers have examined whether parents define bullying along these three elements. Among those that have, most find that parents focus on the intent to cau...

Figure 1: Experimental methodology. The triangulation by walking task (a) is performed for each condition: opaque wall (b), virtual window (c), and virtual window and background (d). ABSTRACT Accurate and usable x-ray vision is a significant goal in augmented reality (AR) development. X-ray vision, or the ability to comprehend location and object i...

Brain injuries can create life-altering challenges and have the potential to leave people with permanent disabilities. Art therapy is a popular method used for treating many of the disabilities that can accompany a brain injury. In a systematic review, an assessment of how art is being used in virtual reality (VR) was conducted, and the feasibility...

Relatively little scholarly work addresses parental experiences with bullying in the United States. This lack of understanding about parental perceptions of bullying is a gap in both the scholarly research and the development of effective bullying prevention programming. This paper presents data from responses to a series of open-ended questions ab...

In room-clearing tasks, SWAT team members suffer from a lack of initial environmental information: knowledge about what is in a room and what relevance or threat level it represents for mission parameters. Normally this gap in situation awareness is rectified only upon room entry, forcing SWAT team members to rely on quick responses and near-instin...

The original version of this chapter was revised. The acknowledgement was inadvertently forgotten. It has been added.

This chapter provides an overview on approaches for planning, designing, and executing human studies for Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). Recent literature is presented on approaches used for conducting studies in human-robot interactions. There is a detailed section on terminology commonly used in HRI studies, along with some statistical calculatio...

The objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of the use of the forensic interview approach for conducting qualitative interviews especially with children in human-robot interaction studies. Presented is a discussion of related work for using qualitative interviews in human-robot interaction studies. A detailed approach on the phases of a...

Voice recognition systems provide a method of hands-free control of robotic systems that may be helpful in law enforcement or military domains. However, the constraints of the operational environment limit the capabilities of the on-board voice recognition system to a keyword-based command system. To effectively use the system, the users must learn...

This article describes ethical issues related to the design and use of social robots in sensitive contexts like psychological interventions and provides insights from one user design study and two controlled experiments with adults and children. User expectations regarding privacy with a therapeutic robotic dog, Therabot, gathered from a 16 partici...

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in HRI research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projects have the overall ambitious...

Recent scholarly research has begun to examine human perceptions toward robots. Researchers have also demonstrated that humans make decisions about individuals based on skin color. However, scant research examines the perceptions that individuals have toward robots of certain colors or whether these perceptions, both negative and positive, are pred...

Path planning plays an integral role in mission planning for ground vehicle operations in urban areas. Determining the optimum path through an urban area is a well-understood problem for traditional ground vehicles; however, in the case of autonomous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), additional factors must be considered. For an autonomous UGV, perc...

Therabot is a robotic therapy support system designed to supplement a therapist and to provide support to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma and adverse events. The system takes on the form factor of a floppy-eared dog which fits in a person»s lap and is designed for patients to provide support and encouragement for home ther...

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projec...

This research investigates the evaluation of a key component in human-robot interaction (HRI), the psychological and physical stress of humans interacting with a robot. This research for understanding the role of stress in human-robot teaming will consist of two phases. The first phase of this research evaluates different methods of inducing stress...

Despite numerous studies on the topic of bullying, there remains a dearth of information on how parents respond to bullying and the extent to which they are aware of their child’s bullying experiences. Using qualitative data from 54 parents in a southeastern state, we explore advice that parents give their children about how to respond when their c...

After playing a five to seven minute character guessing game with a Nao robot, children answered questions about their perceptions of the robot's abilities. Responses from interactions with 30 children, ages eight to twelve, showed that when the robot made an attempt at guessing the participant's character, rather than being stumped and unable to g...

The objective of this research was to investigate how humans would respond to unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) operating in their environment. These environments included a shopping mall, two different sports complexes, and a university campus setting. The field study included video observations of 784 pedestrians. Additionally, survey data were coll...

Interactions between pedestrians and robots are becoming more commonplace. In public areas, for example, robots may be used for information dissemination, security, or patrol tasks. Based upon existing literature in the field of human-robot interaction, the ISAPT simulation system was revised to model individual pedestrian behavior in the presence...

The goal of this paper is to begin a discussion of the benefits, challenges, and ethical concerns related to the use of robots as intermediaries for obtaining sensitive information from children within the human-robot interaction (HRI), criminology, sociology, legal, and psychological communities. This work examines how robots may impede disclosure...

This article presents the results of a literature review and empirical analysis of factors that may influence human perceptions and attitudes toward non-anthropomorphic robots in public spaces. Using data from self-report surveys of 170 adults in a U.S. southeastern state, we examined demographic, attitudinal, and contextual differences in percepti...

Modeling and simulation (M&S) play a critical role in both engineering and basic research processes. Computer-based models have existed since the 1950s, and those early models have given way to the more complex computational and physics-based simulations used today. As such, a great deal of research has been done to establish what level of trust sh...

This research investigated mobile user interface requirements for robots used in tactical operations and evaluated user responses through an iterative participatory design process. A longitudinal observational study (five sessions across six months) was conducted for the iterative development of robot capabilities and a mobile user interface. Selec...

The successful navigation of Unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) is important as UGVs are being increasingly integrated into tactical and reconnaissance operations. Not only is there the possibility of winding environments but also the narrow passage of obstacles. This study investigated a participant’s ability to navigate a maze environment incorporati...

When developing new interface features, it is vital to consider the perspectives of users from several backgrounds throughout the process, in order to ensure features that address realistic user concerns in effective ways. The Systematic Human Error Reduction and Prediction Approach (SHERPA) and an established user acceptance questionnaire were use...

This paper describes the development of a specialized application for voice command recognition for the Jaguar V4 robot in conjunction with the Starkville, MS, USA Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team during training. This training took place at The Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems (CAVS), which provides a specialized environment for police...

The objective of this research is to investigate the use of robots as intermediaries to gather sensitive information from children. The research is multidisciplinary in nature. The goals will be accomplished through the development of an integrated robotic framework that includes a novel architecture and an interactive user interface to gather info...

For adults, the deleterious effect of misleading information on memory was ameliorated when a robot, rather than a human, presented misinformation in an interview (Bethel, Eakin, et al., 2013). Presumably, the robot did not elicit the same social demands that influenced memory as the human interviewer did. The present experiment extended those find...

Recently, it is not unusual to notice media coverage of some major breach in some large organization's cyber security. A large number of said breaches are due to vulnerabilities in their software or system. Once an in-depth analysis of these vulnerabilities was performed, it came to light that a large number of these vulnerabilities were the result...

The use of speech for robots to communicate with their human users has been facilitated by improvements in speech synthesis technology. Now that the intelligibility of synthetic speech has advanced to the point that speech synthesizers are a widely accepted and used technology, what are other aspects of speech synthesis that can be used to improve...

This article outlines a reference architecture for social head gaze generation in social robots. The architecture discussed here is grounded in human communication, based on behavioral robotics theory, and captures the commonalities, essence, and experience of 32 previous social robotics implementations of social head gaze. No such architecture cur...

This workshop aims to share best practices for teaching courses in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). The main focus is on undergraduate and graduate education and training, but K-12 and informal learning environments are also of interest. HRI is still a relatively new field with no standardized textbook or curriculum. Furthermore, HRI education requir...

Therabot™ is an assistive-robotic therapy system designed to provide support during counseling sessions and home therapy practice to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma. It has the form factor of a floppy-eared dog with coloring similar to that of a beagle, and comfortably fits in a person's lap.

Therabot is an assistive-robotic therapy system designed to provide support during counseling sessions and home therapy practice to patients diagnosed with conditions associated with trauma. Studies were conducted to determine desired features of potential end-users of the system, such as clinicians, with feedback from past survivors of trauma to g...

As robotic systems become more sophisticated, they are increasingly called upon to accompany humans in high-stress environments. This research was conducted to support the integration of robotic systems into tactical teams operating in challenging and stressful environments. Robotic systems used to assist tactical teams will need to support some fo...

This study demonstrates that robots can achieve socially acceptable interactions using loosely synchronized head gaze-speech acts. Prior approaches use tightly synchronized head gaze-speech, which requires significant human effort and time to manually annotate synchronization events in advance, restricts interactive dialog, or requires that the ope...

This research explored whether robots can use modern speech synthesizers to convey emotion with their speech. We investigated the use of MARY, an open source speech synthesizer, to convey a robot's emotional intent to novice robot users. The first experiment indicated that participants were able to distinguish the intended emotions of anger, calm,...

This paper introduces and empirically evaluates two scaling functions to alter a robot’s physical movements based on proximity to a human. Previous research has focused on individual aspects of proxemics, like the appropriate distance to maintain from a human, but has not explored autonomous methods to adapt robot behavior as proximity changes. Thi...