Robin Read

Engineered Arts Limited

People are known to change their behavior and decisions to conform to others, even for obviously incorrect facts. Because of recent developments in artificial intelligence and robotics, robots are increasingly found in human environments, and there, they form a novel social presence. It is as yet unclear whether and to what extent these social robo...

The benefit of social robots to support child learning in an educational context over an extended period of time is evaluated. Specifically, the effect of personalisation and adaptation of robot social behaviour is assessed. Two autonomous robots were embedded within two matched classrooms of a primary school for a continuous two week period withou...

Robot behaviour details and questionnaires. Full details of the robot behaviour in the two experimental conditions, and transcript of the questionnaires used in the post-study debriefing. (PDF)

Experimental data spreadsheet. All details of the experimental data, organised by spreadsheet tab, including pre/post and within-interaction learning and performance data, and screen question and questionnaire responses. (ZIP)

This paper presents an experiment investigating the influence that a situational context has upon how people affectively interpret Non-Linguistic Utterances made by a social robot. Subjects were presented five video conditions showing the robot making both a positive and negative utterance, the robot being subject to an action (e.g. receiving a kis...

This paper presents the results of a small experiment aimed at determining whether people are comfortable with a social robot that uses robotic Non-Linguistic Utterances alongside Natural Language, rather than as a replacement. The results suggest that while people have the most preference for a robot that uses only natural language, a robot that c...

In human relationships, responsiveness---behaving in a sensitive manner that is supportive of another person's needs---plays a major role in any interaction that involves effective communication, caregiving, and social support. Perceiving one's partner ...

Child-Robot Interaction (cHRI) is a promising point of entry into the rich challenge that social HRI is. Starting from three years of experiences gained in a cHRI research project, this paper offers a view on the opportunities offered by letting robots interact with children rather than with adults and having the interaction in real-world circumsta...

This paper presents an experiment testing whether adults exhibit Categorical Perception when rating non-linguistic utterances, made by a Nao robot, on an affective level. This experiment followed the traditional methodology used in psychology, with some minor alterations. A stimulus continuum was produced and subjects asked to complete a discrimina...

This report presents data which shows how the AffectButton, a visual tool to report affect, can be used reliably by both adults and children (6-7 y.). Users were asked to identify affective labels, such as scared or surprised, on the AffectButton. We report a high inter-rater reliability between adults, between children and between adults and child...

The 2013 Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) Pioneers Workshop, which will be held in conjunction with the 8th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, is the premiere venue for student research in the field. This highly selective workshop seeks to foster creativity, communication, and collaboration between the world's top student re...

For robots to interact effectively with human users they must be capable of coordinated, timely behavior in response to social context. The Adaptive Strategies for Sustainable Long-Term Social Interaction (ALIZ-E) project focuses on the design of long-term, adaptive social interaction between robots and child users in real-world settings. In this p...

Vocal affective displays are vital for achieving engaging and effective Human-Robot Interaction. The same can be said for linguistic interaction also, however, while emphasis may be placed upon linguistic interaction, there are also inherent risks: users are bound to a single language, and breakdowns are frequent due to current technical limitation...

This paper presents a survey in which participants were asked to interpret non-linguistic utterances made by two dif-ferent types of robot, one humanoid robot and one pet-like robot. The study set out to answer the question of whether the interpretation of emotions differed across types of robots, participant parameters and classes of utterance. We...