Subscribe to the gold package and get unlimited access to Shamra Academy
Register a new userExercise with Social Robots: Companion or Coach?
81
0
0.0
(
0
)
Added by
Alexander Sutherland
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
Ask ChatGPT about the research
No Arabic abstract
In this paper, we investigate the roles that social robots can take in physical exercise with human partners. In related work, robots or virtual intelligent agents take the role of a coach or instructor whereas in other approaches they are used as motivational aids. These are two paradigms, so to speak, within the small but growing area of robots for social exercise. We designed an online questionnaire to test whether the preferred role in which people want to see robots would be the companion or the coach. The questionnaire asks people to imagine working out with a robot with the help of three utilized questionnaires: (1) CART-Q which is used for judging coach-athlete relationships, (2) the mind perception questionnaire and (3) the System Usability Scale (SUS). We present the methodology, some preliminary results as well as our intended future work on personal robots for coaching.
rate research
Read More
We introduce shape-changing swarm robots. A swarm of self-transformable robots can both individually and collectively change their configuration to display information, actuate objects, act as tangible controllers, visualize data, and provide physical affordances. ShapeBots is a concept prototype of shape-changing swarm robots. Each robot can change its shape by leveraging small linear actuators that are thin (2.5 cm) and highly extendable (up to 20cm) in both horizontal and vertical directions. The modular design of each actuator enables various shapes and geometries of self-transformation. We illustrate potential application scenarios and discuss how this type of interface opens up possibilities for the future of ubiquitous and distributed shape-changing interfaces.
Physical embodiment is a required component for robots that are structurally coupled with their real-world environments. However, most socially interactive robots do not need to physically interact with their environments in order to perform their tasks. When and why should embodied robots be used instead of simpler and cheaper virtual agents? This paper reviews the existing work that explores the role of physical embodiment in socially interactive robots. This class consists of robots that are not only capable of engaging in social interaction with humans, but are using primarily their social capabilities to perform their desired functions. Socially interactive robots provide entertainment, information, and/or assistance; this last category is typically encompassed by socially assistive robotics. In all cases, such robots can achieve their primary functions without performing functional physical work. To comprehensively evaluate the existing body of work on embodiment, we first review work from established related fields including psychology, philosophy, and sociology. We then systematically review 65 studies evaluating aspects of embodiment published from 2003 to 2017 in major peer-reviewed robotics publication venues. We examine relevant aspects of the selected studies, focusing on the embodiments compared, tasks evaluated, social roles of robots, and measurements. We introduce three taxonomies for the types of robot embodiment, robot social roles, and human-robot tasks. These taxonomies are used to deconstruct the design and interaction spaces of socially interactive robots and facilitate analysis and discussion of the reviewed studies. We use this newly-defined methodology to critically discuss existing works, revealing topics within embodiment research for social interaction, assistive robotics, and service robotics.
RoomShift is a room-scale dynamic haptic environment for virtual reality, using a small swarm of robots that can move furniture. RoomShift consists of nine shape-changing robots: Roombas with mechanical scissor lifts. These robots drive beneath a piece of furniture to lift, move and place it. By augmenting virtual scenes with physical objects, users can sit on, lean against, place and otherwise interact with furniture with their whole body; just as in the real world. When the virtual scene changes or users navigate within it, the swarm of robots dynamically reconfigures the physical environment to match the virtual content. We describe the hardware and software implementation, applications in virtual tours and architectural design and interaction techniques.
This work creates a model of the value of different external viewpoints of a robot performing tasks. The current state of the practice is to use a teleoperated assistant robot to provide a view of a task being performed by a primary robot; however, the choice of viewpoints is ad hoc and does not always lead to improved performance. This research applies a psychomotor approach to develop a model of the relative quality of external viewpoints using Gibsonian affordances. In this approach, viewpoints for the affordances are rated based on the psychomotor behavior of human operators and clustered into manifolds of viewpoints with the equivalent value. The value of 30 viewpoints is quantified in a study with 31 expert robot operators for 4 affordances (Reachability, Passability, Manipulability, and Traversability) using a computer-based simulator of two robots. The adjacent viewpoints with similar values are clustered into ranked manifolds using agglomerative hierarchical clustering. The results show the validity of the affordance-based approach by confirming that there are manifolds of statistically significantly different viewpoint values, viewpoint values are statistically significantly dependent on the affordances, and viewpoint values are independent of a robot. Furthermore, the best manifold for each affordance provides a statistically significant improvement with a large Cohens d effect size (1.1-2.3) in performance (improving time by 14%-59% and reducing errors by 87%-100%) and improvement in performance variation over the worst manifold. This model will enable autonomous selection of the best possible viewpoint and path planning for the assistant robot.
Achieving human-like motion in robots has been a fundamental goal in many areas of robotics research. Inverse kinematic (IK) solvers have been explored as a solution to provide kinematic structures with anthropomorphic movements. In particular, numeric solvers based on geometry, such as FABRIK, have shown potential for producing human-like motion at a low computational cost. Nevertheless, these methods have shown limitations when solving for robot kinematic constraints. This work proposes a framework inspired by FABRIK for human pose imitation in real-time. The goal is to mitigate the problems of the original algorithm while retaining the resulting humanlike fluidity and low cost. We first propose a human constraint model for pose imitation. Then, we present a pose imitation algorithm (PIC), and its soft version (PICs) that can successfully imitate human poses using the proposed constraint system. PIC was tested on two collaborative robots (Baxter and YuMi). Fifty human demonstrations were collected for a bi-manual assembly and an incision task. Then, two performance metrics were obtained for both robots: pose accuracy with respect to the human and the percentage of environment occlusion/obstruction. The performance of PIC and PICs was compared against the numerical solver baseline (FABRIK). The proposed algorithms achieve a higher pose accuracy than FABRIK for both tasks (25%-FABRIK, 53%-PICs, 58%-PICs). In addition, PIC and its soft version achieve a lower percentage of occlusion during incision (10%-FABRIK, 4%-PICs, 9%-PICs). These results indicate that the PIC method can reproduce human poses and achieve key desired effects of human imitation.
Log in to be able to interact and post comments
comments
Fetching comments
Sign in to be able to follow your search criteria
