Tom Ziemke

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• PhD
• Professor at Linköping University

People’s preferences regarding cognitive and emotional capabilities in robots need to be considered in the design of robotic systems that align with human values and expectations. This study investigates how such preferences vary across different robotics application domains and identifies key influencing factors. In a between-subjects study with 2...

Significant amounts of HRI research effort are spent on the design/evaluation of robot bodies. Critical discussion and debates concerning the way bodies are treated and considered within HRI have tended to focus on the implications of designing/interacting with highly anthropomorphic robots, yet drawing attention away from the human body in HRI, pa...

Aiming for “humanlike” or “natural” interactions can make social robots and their limitations more difficult to understand.

In this commentary we would like to question (a) Clark and Fischer's characterization of the "social artifact puzzle" - which we consider less puzzling than the authors, and (b) their account of social robots as depictions involving three physical scenes - which to us seems unnecessarily complex. We contrast the authors' model with a more parsimoni...

Much research in robotic artificial intelligence (AI) and Artificial Life has focused on autonomous agents as an embodied and situated approach to AI. Such systems are commonly viewed as overcoming many of the philosophical problems associated with traditional computationalist AI and cognitive science, such as the grounding problem (Harnad) or the...

Behavioral variability can be used to make robots more human-like, but we propose that it may be wiser to make them less so.

A definition of information fusion (IF) as a field of research can benefit researchers within the field, who may use such a definition when motivating their own work and evaluating the contributions of others. Moreover, it can enable researchers and practitioners outside the field to more easily relate their own work to the field and more easily un...

The overall aim of the school subject technology is to develop pupils' understanding of technological solutions in everyday life. A starting point for this study is that it is important for teachers in technology to have knowledge of pupils' prior conceptions of the subject content since these can both support and hinder their learning. In a previo...

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting...

The topic of mental state attribution to robots has been approached by researchers from a variety of disciplines, including psychology, neuroscience, computer science, and philosophy. As a consequence, the empirical studies that have been conducted so far exhibit considerable diversity in terms of how the phenomenon is described and how it is appro...

Evaluations of social robots for older adults in care home environments during the past 20 years have shown mostly positive results. However, many of these studies have been short-term and with few participants, as well as limited to few countries. Recent evidence, however, indicates that social robots might not work in all settings or for everyone...

The explainability of robotic systems depends on people’s ability to reliably attribute perceptual beliefs to robots, i.e., what robots know (or believe) about objects and events in the world based on their perception. However, the perceptual systems of robots are not necessarily well understood by the majority of people interacting with them. In t...

Future Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are projected to fly and operate in swarms. The swarm metaphor makes explicit and implicit mappings regarding system architecture and human interaction to aspects of natural systems, such as bee societies. Compared to the metaphor of a team, swarming agents as individuals are less capable, more expendable, and...

Companion robots, and especially robotic pets, have been argued to have the potential for improving the well-being of elderly people with dementia. Previous research has mainly focused on short-term studies, conducted with relatively expensive robot platforms. With cheaper options on the market, residential homes in Sweden have started to use low-c...

Interaction between humans and robots will benefit if people have at least a rough mental model of what a robot knows about the world and what it plans to do. But how do we design human-robot interactions to facilitate this? Previous research has shown that one can change people’s mental models of robots by manipulating the robots’ physical appeara...

Keeping track of others' perceptual beliefs—what they perceive and know about the current situation—is imperative in many social contexts. In a series of experiments, we set out to investigate people's ability to keep track of what robots know or believe about objects and events in the environment. To this end, we subjected 155 experimental partici...

Elucidating the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying people's interpretation of robot behavior can inform the design of interactive autonomous systems, such as social robots and automated vehicles.

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervise...

There is an alarming rise/increase of older people in EUs population, with an expected percentage of people over 65 at 30% by 2060, and the majority of older workers willing to work past their traditional retirement age. The concept of Work Ability, which has been developed as an important multi-factor concept that can be used to identify workers a...

Europe is being severely challenged by the ageing of the population, and although for well over a decade now is looking for strategies to effectively increase the labour force participation of older workers and reduce the rates of early retirement and labour market exit, the unemployment amongst older people remains particularly high. The design an...

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people's lives, it is of major importance to stress the need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between hum...

It is evident that recently reported robot-assisted therapy systems for assessment of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) lack autonomous interaction abilities and require significant human resources. This paper proposes a sensing system that automatically extracts and fuses sensory features such as body motion features, facial expressions...

Welcome to SweCog 2018 in Linköping! This booklet contains the program and short papers for oral and poster presentations at SweCog 2018, this year’s edition of the annual conference of the Swedish Cognitive Science Society. Following the SweCog tradition and its aim to support networking among researchers in cognitive science and related areas, c...

The development of social robots for children with autism has been a growth field for the past 15 years. This article reviews studies in robots and autism as a neurodevelopmental disorder that impacts socialcommunication development, and the ways social robots could help children with autism develop social skills. Drawing on ethics research from th...

The increasing complexity of robotic systems are pressing the need for them to be transparent and trustworthy. When people interact with a robotic system, they will inevitably construct mental models to understand and predict its actions. However, people»s mental models of robotic systems stem from their interactions with living beings, which induc...

People rely on shared folk-psychological theories when judging behavior. These theories guide people’s social interactions and therefore need to be taken into consideration in the design of robots and other autonomous systems expected to interact socially with people. It is, however, not yet clear to what degree the mechanisms that underlie people’...

Several Wizard-of-Oz techniques have been developed to make robots appear autonomous and more social in human-robot interaction. Many of the existing solutions use control interfaces that introduce significant time delays and hamper the robot operator's ability to produce socially appropriate responses in real time interactions. We present work in...

In an explorative study concerning the social acceptance of two specific humanoid robots, the experimenter asked participants (N = 36) to place a book in an adjacent room. Upon entering the room, participants were confronted by a NAO or a Pepper robot expressing persistent opposition against the idea of placing the book in the room. On average, 72%...

In order for autonomous robots to be able to support people's well-being in homes and everyday environments, new interactive capabilities will be required, as exemplified by the soft design used for Disney's recent robot character Baymax in popular fiction. Home robots will be required to be easy to interact with and intelligent--adaptive, fun, uno...

The question motivating the work presented here, starting from a view of music as embodied and situated activity, is how can we account for the complexity of interactive music performance situations. These are situations in which human performers interact with responsive technologies, such as sensor-driven technology or sound synthesis affected by...

The question motivating the work presented here, starting from a view of music as embodied and situated activity, is how can we account for the complexity of interactive music performance situations. These are situations in which human performers interact with responsive technologies, such as sensor-driven technology or sound synthesis affected by...

The present study used a questionnaire-based method for investigating people’s interpretations of behavior exhibited by a person and a humanoid robot, respectively. Participants were given images and verbal descriptions of different behaviors and were asked to judge the plausibility of seven causal explanation types. Results indicate that human and...

This special issue brings together six papers on situation awareness in human-machine interactive systems, in particular in teams of collaborating humans and artificial agents. The editorial provides a brief introduction and overviews the contributions, addressing issues such as team and shared situation awareness, trust, transparency, timing, enga...

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) through remote control of the robot in so-called Wizard of Oz (WoZ) paradigms. However, there is a need to increase the autonomy of the robot both to lighten the burden on human therapists (who have to remain in control...

Socially interactive robots are expected to have an increasing importance in human society. For social robots to provide long-term added value to people's lives, it is of major importance to stress the need for positive user experience (UX) of such robots. The human-centered view emphasizes various aspects that emerge in the interaction between hum...

To be able to understand the intentions of other agents is a fundamental prerequisite for engaging in, for instance, instrumental helping or mutual collaboration. In HRI, the challenge is bi-directional: not only does a robot need the ability to infer intentions of humans, but humans also need to infer the intentions of the robot. It is therefore i...

Participants in a study concerning social attitudes toward robots were randomly assigned a questionnaire form displaying a non-, semi- or highly anthropomorphic robot as a hidden intervention. Results indicate that asking people about their attitudes toward "robots" in general -- as done in some studies -- is questionable, given that (a) outcomes c...

Previous work indicates that physical robots elicit more favorable social responses than virtual agents. These effects have been attributed to the physical embodiment. However, a recent meta-analysis by Li [1] suggests that the benefits of robots are due to physical presence rather than physical embodiment. To further explore the importance of pres...

Embodied cognition is a hot topic in both cognitive science and AI, despite that fact that there still is relatively little consensus regarding what exactly constitutes ‘embodiment’. While most embodied AI research views the body as the physical/sensorimotor interface that allows to ground computational cognition processes in sensorimotor interacti...

The concept of affordances indicates "action possibilities" as characterized by object properties the environment provides to interacting organisms. Affordances relate to both perception and action and refer to sensory-motor processes emerging from goal-directed object interaction. In contrast to stable properties, affordances may vary with environ...

Several simulation theories have been proposed as an explanation for how humans and other agents internalize an “inner world” that allows them to simulate interactions with the external real world – prospectively and retrospectively. Such internal simulation of interaction with the environment has been argued to be a key mechanism behind mentalizin...

We argue that the development of robots that can interact effectively with people requires a special focus on building systems that can perceive and comprehend intentions in other agents. Such a capability is a prerequisite for all pro-social behaviour and in particular underpins the ability to engage in instrumental helping and mutual collaboratio...

The reciprocal coupling of perception and action in cognitive agents has been firmly established: perceptions guide action but so too do actions influence what is perceived. While much has been said on the implications of this for the agent's external behavior, less attention has been paid to what it means for the internal bodily mechanisms which u...

Welcome to SweCog 2015! The aim of the Swedish Cognitive Science Society is to support networking among researchers in Sweden, with the goal of creating a strong interdisciplinary cluster of cognitive science oriented research. This little booklet contains the abstracts of the invited talks as well as all oral and poster presentations at the 201...

In this article, we propose an architecture of a bio-inspired controller that addresses the problem of learning different locomotion gaits for different robot morphologies. The modeling objective is split into two: baseline motion modeling and dynamics adaptation. Baseline motion modeling aims to achieve fundamental functions of a certain type of l...

This paper presents a study focused on comparing driving behavior of expert and novice drivers in a mid-range driving simulator with the intention of evaluating the validity of driving simulators for driver training. For the investigation, measurements of performance, psychophysiological measurements, and self-reported user experience under differe...

The recent trend in cognitive robotics experiments on language learning, symbol grounding, and related issues necessarily entails a reduction of sensorimotor aspects from those provided by a human body to those that can be realized in machines, limiting robotic models of symbol grounding in this respect. Here, we argue that there is a need for mode...

This paper presents a study focused on comparing driving behavior of expert and novice drivers in a mid-range driving simulator with the intention of evaluating the validity of driving simulators for driver training. For the investigation, measurements of performance, psychophysiological measurements, and self-reported user experience under differe...

There is increasingly much agreement in the cognitive sciences that human cognition is embodied-to some significant extent. However, there is much less agreement regarding in what sense(s) cognition is embodied. In particular, there is much agreement that sensorimotor interaction with the environment is fundamental to cognition. From a historical p...

This paper presents a study focused on comparing driving behavior of expert and novice drivers in a mid-range driving simulator with the intention of evaluating the validity of driving simulators for driver training. For the investigation, measurements of performance, psychophysiological measurements, and self-reported user experience under differe...

Context • Most constructivist discourse is situated at the philosophical-conceptual level, where arguments appeal to the intuition of the reader, while formal-computational models have only been taken into account to a very limited degree so far. > Problem • Two types of problems need to be addressed: Synthetically, can constructivist concepts be t...

According to the simulation hypothesis, mental imagery can be explained in terms of predictive chains of simulated perceptions and actions, i.e., perceptions and actions are reactivated internally by our nervous system to be used in mental imagery and other cognitive phenomena. Our previous research shows that it is possible but not trivial to deve...

Background / Purpose: The concept of affordances was first introduced by the ecological psychologist James J Gibson (1979) (1) to indicate properties the environment provides to acting organisms which are relevant for a goal. Affordances are neither objects nor properties of the organism or environment but rather emerge from the interaction betwe...

This paper presents a study focused on comparing real actors based scenarios and animated characters based scenarios with respect to their similarity in evoking psychophysiological activity for certain events by measuring galvanic skin response (GSR). In the experiment, one group (n=11) watched the real actors’ film whereas another group (n=7) watc...

Abstract We present a novel example of a biomechatronic hybrid system. The living component of the system, embedded within microbial fuel cells, relies on the availability of food and water in order to produce electrical energy. The latter is essential to the operations of the mechatronic component, responsible for finding and collecting food and w...

Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) is an emerging field that has already seen some success and is likely to develop in the future. One particular application area is within therapies for autism spectrum disorders, in which the viability of the approach has been demonstrated. The present paper is a vision paper with the aim of identifying research direct...

The identification of learning mechanisms for locomotion has been the subject of much research for some time but many challenges remain. Dynamic systems theory (DST) offers a novel approach to humanoid learning through environmental interaction. Reinforcement learning (RL) has offered a promising method to adaptively link the dynamic system to the...

In this paper we review the functional role that reinforcement plays in notions of affective computation and emotion. We consider three core components of emotional activity - emotion triggers, actions and action tendencies, and feeling states - and evaluate each component in relation to reinforcement learning and behaviour theory as well as with r...

We present a reinforcement learning algorithm based on Dyna-Sarsa that utilizes separate representations of reward and punishment when guiding state-action value learning and action selection. The adoption of policy meta-learning optimized by a genetic algorithm is explored and results in the context of a two-armed bandit goal-navigation task in a...

Neuroscientific and psychological data suggest a close link between affordance and mirror systems in the brain. However, we still lack a full understanding of both the individual systems and their interactions. Here, we propose that the architecture and functioning of the two systems is best understood in terms of two challenges faced by complex or...

Computer games are increasingly used for purposes beyond mere entertainment, and current hi-tech simulators can provide quite, naturalistic contexts for purposes such as traffic education. One of the critical concerns in this area is the validity or transferability of acquired skills from a simulator to the real world context. In this paper, we pre...

Upshot . Complementary to Alroe and Noe's discussion of constructivist notions of environment, world, etc., this commentary addresses the closely-related notion of agency in constructivist theories - in particular, the question of what would be required for artificial agency - and identifies open questions and fundamental disagreements among constr...

In this article, we use a recurrent neural network including four-cell core architecture to model the walking gait and implement it with the simulated and physical NAO robot. Meanwhile, inspired by the biological CPG models, we propose a simplified CPG model which comprises motorneurons, interneurons, sensor neurons and the simplified spinal cord....