Human-robot Interaction Research Research Articles

Human–Robot interaction research in hospitality and tourism: trends and future directions

Purpose This paper aims to synthesize the evolving research of human–robot interaction (HRI) in the hospitality and tourism industry, identifying gaps and setting directions for future research. Design/methodology/approach Using a mixed-method approach, the study combines inductive co-citation analysis with deductive theory-context-characteristics-methodology analysis. Findings The findings trace the progression of HRI knowledge from initial feasibility and acceptance studies to advanced post-adoption experience management. The analysis identifies prevalent theories such as anthropomorphism theory, specific contexts like hotel environments, diverse robot types (e.g. embodied robots), outcome measures (e.g. use intention) and methodologies predominantly comprising survey-based analyses and experimental approaches. The analysis not only illuminates areas of research attention but also uncovers under-explored topics, offering a roadmap for future inquiry in tourism and HRI research. Originality/value The paper contributes to the literature by providing a structured framework that not only maps the intellectual structure of HRI research in tourism but also proposes a cohesive integration of disparate theories and methodologies, addressing both practical and academic gaps.

Older adults and robot literacy

ABSTRACT Robots have acquired roles in the provision of information and services. Older adults may interact with robots in many settings, including their homes and public places and, for example, care settings in or outside their homes. In older adults’ care, robots are used to assist their daily tasks, such as cleaning, eating, dressing, bathing, social interaction, entertainment, and medication taking. Consequently, older adults are required to have robot literacy, which has been suggested as a subset of media literacy. However, up to date, only a few researchers have defined robot literacy. In this conceptual article, we first discuss robots in the everyday lives of older adults. Second, drawing on previous studies on media literacies, digital competences, human-robot interaction and other relevant research fields, we define robot literacy as a multidimensional set of skills comprising the following seven skill dimensions: 1) awareness of robots; 2) interaction with robots; 3) understanding and evaluation of the information provided by robots; 4) understanding the data security and privacy of robots; 5) programming of robots; 6) ethical reflection; and 7) providing and receiving social support. Finally, we discuss the applicability of the concept of robot literacy and the limitations of our definition of the concept.

Human-Robot Interaction and Social Robot: The Emerging Field of Healthcare Robotics and Current and Future Perspectives for Spinal Care.

Recent advances in robotics technology and artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked increased interest in humanoid robots that resemble humans and social robots capable of interacting socially. Alongside this trend, a new field of robot research called human-robot interaction (HRI) is gaining prominence. The aim of this review paper is to introduce the fundamental concepts of HRI and social robots, examine their current applications in the medical field, and discuss the current and future prospects of HRI and social robots in spinal care. HRI is an interdisciplinary field where robotics, AI, social sciences, design, and various disciplines collaborate organically to develop robots that successfully interact with humans as the ultimate goal. While social robots are not yet widely deployed in clinical environments, ongoing HRI research encompasses various areas such as nursing and caregiving support, social and emotional assistance, rehabilitation and cognitive enhancement for the elderly, medical information provision and education, as well as patient monitoring and data collection. Although still in its early stages, research related to spinal care includes studies on robotic support for rehabilitation exercises, assistance in gait training, and questionnaire-based assessments for spinal pain. Future applications of social robots in spinal care will require diverse HRI research efforts and active involvement from spinal specialists.

Examining Psychological Conflict-Handling Strategies for Highly Automated Vehicles to Resolve Legal User-Vehicle Conflicts

As vehicle automation progresses, with SAE levels 3 to 5 introducing varying degrees of control transfer from driver to vehicle, a key challenge emerges: aligning driver interests with the automated vehicle's (AV) operational goals. Despite technical feasibility, drivers' tendencies to intervene due to distrust in or dissatisfaction with AVs necessitate consideration of control mechanisms in future AV designs. This study investigates the potential of persuasion strategies inspired by Human-Robot Interaction research to harmonize driver actions with AV goals in legal conflict situations. We conducted a Virtual Reality driving simulator study with 36 participants, comparing 11 persuasive conflict-handling strategies and a baseline of no persuasion. Our research helps understand the effects of persuasion on users' compliance with law-abiding AV goals, trust, and acceptance towards the AV and evaluates the effectiveness of these strategies based on their working mechanism (cognitive, emotional, social, politeness) and valence (negative, neutral, positive). Results show that none of the strategies could substantially increase compliance with the AV, but neutral and positive persuasion strategies did not decrease acceptance and trust towards the AV compared to no persuasion. These findings contribute to the discourse on cooperation design and control allocation in AVs, particularly in scenarios involving legal conflicts.

Let’s Get Physical: The Influence of Embodiment on Industrial Human-Robot Interaction

In recent years, an increasing number of studies in human-robot interaction (HRI) have used images or videos of robots as a simple, inexpensive, and customizable substitute for physically embodied robots. Thus, the question arises whether results from studies using depictions can be validly applied to interactions with embodied robots. This study investigated the effect of embodiment in HRI within an industrial interaction scenario, focusing on perception, trust, and task performance. Eighty-five participants interacted either with an embodied robot or its depiction via a computer screen. Results showed that the embodied robot was perceived as more likable, intelligent, and safer, eliciting higher initial trust. Primary task performance was observed to be higher in interaction with the embodied robot, while secondary task performance was higher in interaction with the robot’s depiction. These findings challenge the generalizability of depiction-based HRI research, highlighting the importance of considering embodiment in future research designs.

AdaptiX - A Transitional XR Framework for Development and Evaluation of Shared Control Applications in Assistive Robotics

With the ongoing efforts to empower people with mobility impairments and the increase in technological acceptance by the general public, assistive technologies, such as collaborative robotic arms, are gaining popularity. Yet, their widespread success is limited by usability issues, specifically the disparity between user input and software control along the autonomy continuum. To address this, shared control concepts provide opportunities to combine the targeted increase of user autonomy with a certain level of computer assistance. This paper presents the free and open-source AdaptiX XR framework for developing and evaluating shared control applications in a high-resolution simulation environment. The initial framework consists of a simulated robotic arm with an example scenario in Virtual Reality (VR), multiple standard control interfaces, and a specialized recording/replay system. AdaptiX can easily be extended for specific research needs, allowing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers to rapidly design and test novel interaction methods, intervention strategies, and multi-modal feedback techniques, without requiring an actual physical robotic arm during the early phases of ideation, prototyping, and evaluation. Also, a Robot Operating System (ROS) integration enables the controlling of a real robotic arm in a PhysicalTwin approach without any simulation-reality gap. Here, we review the capabilities and limitations of AdaptiX in detail and present three bodies of research based on the framework. AdaptiX can be accessed at https://adaptix.robot-research.de.

Human-Robot Task Handoff: A Probabilistic Modeling Approach Explored through Cooperative Drawing

Recent research in human-robot interaction explores the potential for human-machine collaboration in surgical procedures, dividing tasks into manual and automatable subtasks. This paper investigates the task of handoff detection, crucial for the success of robot-assisted surgery, focusing on the creation of a synthetic dataset which can be used for training and benchmarking models for this task. We present a dataset of parabolas, simulating cooperative drawing between a human and a robot, with variations in drawing rates and added noise. The study demonstrates the applicability of HMMs in determining handoff points, laying the groundwork for future research in human-machine collaborative surgery. The dataset, along with the provided code and raw data, are provided as a resource for future research. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the dataset and suggest directions for future research, emphasizing the need for higher-dimensional and real-world datasets.

Gaze-based intention estimation: principles, methodologies, and applications in HRI

Intention prediction has become a relevant field of research in Human-Machine and Human-Robot Interaction. Indeed, any artificial system (co)-operating with and along humans, designed to assist and coordinate its actions with a human partner, would benefit from first inferring the human’s current intention. To spare the user the cognitive burden of explicitly uttering their goals, this inference relies mostly on behavioral cues deemed indicative of the current action. It has been long known that eye movements are highly anticipatory of the single steps unfolding during a task, hence they can serve as a very early and reliable behavioural cue for intention recognition. This conceptual review aims to draw a line between insights in the psychological literature on visuomotor control and relevant applications of gaze-based intention recognition in technical domains, with a focus on teleoperated and assistive robotic systems. Starting from the cognitive principles underlying the relationship between intentions, eye movements, and action, the use of eye tracking and gaze-based models for intent recognition in Human-Robot Interaction is considered, with prevalent methodologies and their diverse applications. Finally, special consideration is given to relevant human factors issues and current limitations to be factored in when designing such systems.

Social robot accessories for tailoring and appropriation of social robots

AbstractThe design of robots for everyday use should take into account the specific nature of the individual end-user and the possibility of interactions with multiple users in diverse scenarios, promoting versatility and increasing the chances of their successful adoption in everyday environments. Most robots are designed, however, to perform tasks and interact in typical social scenarios with an abstract human user. We observed a recent surge in the use of accessories with social robots, which aligns with a broader trend of consumers’ preference for personalizing the technologies they interact with. Drawing from the concepts of adaptability and customizability in collaborative systems, we explore the potential use of accessory-like items for social robots to enable low-tech customization and user appropriation, thus enhancing their value and suitability in various social situations. We draw from Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Supported Co-operative Work literature to show how end-user customizability and appropriation are essential, but less frequently considered, in the study and design of social robots. We conceptualize Social Robot Accessories (SRAs) as a way for end-users to customize robots, and present three studies - (1) a literature survey on accessory-like item use with social robots, (2) a survey of commercially available robot accessories, and (3) a Twitter-based analysis of accessory use for AIBO and LOVOT robots by their users. We use findings from these studies to envision a design space of SRAs for use by Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers.

Previous Experience Matters: An in-Person Investigation of Expectations in Human–Robot Interaction

The human–robot interaction (HRI) field goes beyond the mere technical aspects of developing robots, often investigating how humans perceive robots. Human perceptions and behavior are determined, in part, by expectations. Given the impact of expectations on behavior, it is important to understand what expectations individuals bring into HRI settings and how those expectations may affect their interactions with the robot over time. For many people, social robots are not a common part of their experiences, thus any expectations they have of social robots are likely shaped by other sources. As a result, individual expectations coming into HRI settings may be highly variable. Although there has been some recent interest in expectations within the field, there is an overall lack of empirical investigation into its impacts on HRI, especially in-person robot interactions. To this end, a within-subject in-person study (N=31\\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \\usepackage{amsmath} \\usepackage{wasysym} \\usepackage{amsfonts} \\usepackage{amssymb} \\usepackage{amsbsy} \\usepackage{mathrsfs} \\usepackage{upgreek} \\setlength{\\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \\begin{document}$$N=31$$\\end{document}) was performed where participants were instructed to engage in open conversation with the social robot Pepper during two 2.5 min sessions. The robot was equipped with a custom dialogue system based on the GPT-3 large language model, allowing autonomous responses to verbal input. Participants’ affective changes towards the robot were assessed using three questionnaires, NARS, RAS, commonly used in HRI studies, and Closeness, based on the IOS scale. In addition to the three standard questionnaires, a custom question was administered to capture participants’ views on robot capabilities. All measures were collected three times, before the interaction with the robot, after the first interaction with the robot, and after the second interaction with the robot. Results revealed that participants to large degrees stayed with the expectations they had coming into the study, and in contrast to our hypothesis, none of the measured scales moved towards a common mean. Moreover, previous experience with robots was revealed to be a major factor of how participants experienced the robot in the study. These results could be interpreted as implying that expectations of robots are to large degrees decided before interactions with the robot, and that these expectations do not necessarily change as a result of the interaction. Results reveal a strong connection to how expectations are studied in social psychology and human-human interaction, underpinning its relevance for HRI research.

A Psychological Need-Fulfillment Perspective for Designing Social Robots that Support Well-Being

This conceptual paper presents a novel framework for the design and study of social robots that support well-being. Building upon the self-determination theory and the associated Motivation, Engagement, and Thriving in User Experience (METUX) model, this paper argues that users’ psychological basic needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness should be put at the center of social robot design. These basic needs are essential to people’s psychological well-being, engagement, and self-motivation. However, current literature offers limited insights into how human–robot interactions are related to users’ experiences of the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs and thus, to their well-being and flourishing. We propose that a need-fulfillment perspective could be an inspiring lens for the design of social robots, including socially assistive robots. We conceptualize various ways in which a psychological need-fulfillment perspective may be incorporated into future human–robot interaction research and design, ranging from the interface level to the specific tasks performed by a robot or the user’s behavior supported by the robot. The paper discusses the implications of the framework for designing social robots that promote well-being, as well as the implications for future research.

Privacy and utility perceptions of social robots in healthcare

Many Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers are exploring the use of healthcare robots. Due to the sensitive nature of care, privacy concerns play a significant role in determining robot utility and adoption. While HRI research has explored some dimensions of privacy for robots in general, to our knowledge, no prior work has empirically studied how human-like robot design affects people's privacy and utility perceptions of robots across different healthcare contexts and tasks. We conducted a 3 × 3 × 3 study (n = 239) to understand these relationships, varying robot Human Likeness (HL) (low, medium, and high) and scenario/task type (hospital waiting room/robot check-in support, hospital patient room/robot mobility support, home care/robot neurorehabilitation support) via a mixed between-within subjects design. To our knowledge, this is one of the first studies that operationalizes complex constructs of privacy, healthcare, and HL across multiple realistic healthcare contexts, with a high degree of cognitive fidelity. Our results suggest the tasks and contexts in which privacy is considered in healthcare contexts with robots is more impactful than other factors like robot HL appearance. In particular, some settings include more complex tradeoffs between privacy and utility for robots than others. For example, HRI researchers and practitioners who want to build healthcare robots intended for the home may encounter the greatest challenges for balancing privacy risks. Finally, for the community, we demonstrate that design fiction animations can be a useful way to facilitate cognitive fidelity for supporting studies in HRI and serving as a bridge between narrative methods and the use of real-world robots.

Working with roubles and failures in conversation between humans and robots: workshop report.

This paper summarizes the structure and findings from the first Workshop on Troubles and Failures in Conversations between Humans and Robots. The workshop was organized to bring together a small, interdisciplinary group of researchers working on miscommunication from two complementary perspectives. One group of technology-oriented researchers was made up of roboticists, Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers and dialogue system experts. The second group involved experts from conversation analysis, cognitive science, and linguistics. Uniting both groups of researchers is the belief that communication failures between humans and machines need to be taken seriously and that a systematic analysis of such failures may open fruitful avenues in research beyond current practices to improve such systems, including both speech-centric and multimodal interfaces. This workshop represents a starting point for this endeavour. The aim of the workshop was threefold: Firstly, to establish an interdisciplinary network of researchers that share a common interest in investigating communicative failures with a particular view towards robotic speech interfaces; secondly, to gain a partial overview of the "failure landscape" as experienced by roboticists and HRI researchers; and thirdly, to determine the potential for creating a robotic benchmark scenario for testing future speech interfaces with respect to the identified failures. The present article summarizes both the "failure landscape" surveyed during the workshop as well as the outcomes of the attempt to define a benchmark scenario.

Do Robots Have Sex? A Prolegomenon

Research in Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) suggests that people attribute gender to (some) robots. In this paper we outline a program of research on the gendering of robots and on the ethical issues raised by such gendering. Understanding which robots are gendered, when, and why, will require careful research in HRI, drawing on anthropology and social psychology, informed by state-of-the-art research in gender studies and critical theory. Design features of robots that might influence the attribution of gender include: appearance; tone of voice; speech repertoire; range and style of movement; behaviour; and, intended function. Robots may be gendered differently depending on: the age, class, sex, ethnicity, and sexuality of the person doing the attributing; local cultural histories; social cues from the designers, the physical and institutional environment, and other users; and the role of the robot. An adequate account of the gender of robots will also need to pay attention to the limits of a sex/gender distinction, which has historically been maintained by reference to a “sex” located in a biological body, when it comes to theorising the gender of robots. We argue that, on some accounts of what it is to be sexed, robots might “have” sex: they might be male and female in just the same way as (most) human beings are. Addressing the ethical issues raised by the gendering of robots will require further progress in “robot media ethics”, as well as an account of the responsibilities of both designers and users in a broader social context.

Towards a conceptualisation and critique of everyday life in HRI.

This paper focuses on the topic of "everyday life" as it is addressed in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. It starts from the argument that while human daily life with social robots has been increasingly discussed and studied in HRI, the concept of everyday life lacks clarity or systematic analysis, and it plays only a secondary role in supporting the study of the key HRI topics. In order to help conceptualise everyday life as a research theme in HRI in its own right, we provide an overview of the Social Science and Humanities (SSH) perspectives on everyday life and lived experiences, particularly in sociology, and identify the key elements that may serve to further develop and empirically study such a concept in HRI. We propose new angles of analysis that may help better explore unique aspects of human engagement with social robots. We look at the everyday not just as a reality as we know it (i.e., the realm of the "ordinary") but also as the future that we need to envision and strive to materialise (i.e., the transformation that will take place through the "extraordinary" that comes with social robots). Finally, we argue that HRI research would benefit not only from engaging with a systematic conceptualisation but also critique of the contemporary everyday life with social robots. This is how HRI studies could play an important role in challenging the current ways of understanding of what makes different aspects of the human world "natural" and ultimately help bringing a social change towards what we consider a "good life."

AAAI 2023 Spring Symposium on HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap

AbstractOn March 27–29, 2023, the AAAI symposium on “HRI in Academia and Industry: Bridging the Gap” was held in a hybrid format, with both in‐person and remote participants, gathering Human‐Robot Interaction (HRI) researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and national research laboratories to find common ground, understand the different constraints at play, and determine how to work together. The use of robots that operate in spaces in which humans are physically co‐present is growing at a dramatic rate. We are seeing more and more robots in our warehouses, on our streets, and even in our homes. All of these robots will interact with humans in some way, whether intentionally or unintentionally. To be successful, their interactions with humans will have to be carefully designed. For more than a decade, the field of HRI has been growing at the intersection of robotics, Artificial Intelligence (AI) , human‐computer interaction (HCI), psychology, and other fields; however, until quite recently, it has been a largely academic area, with university researchers proposing, implementing, and reporting on experiments at a limited scale. With the current increase of commercially‐available robots, HRI is starting to make its way into the robotics industry in a meaningful way. This symposium brought together HRI researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and national research laboratories to find common ground, understand the different constraints at play, and determine how to effectively work together.

Ethics and Robot Democratization: Reflecting on Integrative Ethics Practices

This paper aims to address the need for new integrative approaches to aid the further development of robot ethics as a research field. It presents observations gathered in a collaborative robotics project that pursued an integrative ethics approach. The paper first contextualizes the increasing attention to ethical approaches in robotics development, design and implementation. Several existing considerations and attempts to further integrate ethics into the field of robotics are reviewed, while also providing context with respect to new trends that generate new possibilities for integrating ethical approaches into robotics and human-robot interaction research. Subsequently, the paper elaborates on the specificities of the collaborative robotics project that pursued an integrative approach. The collaborative robot is presented as a specific type of technological artifact, and insight is given into the project’s aim to “democratize” this technology. Furthermore, practices required to integrate ethics are reviewed based on the author’s observations and experiences in the project. Finally, to contribute to the further development of integrative approaches in robot ethics, these observations are developed into three constitutive components that should aid the further development of integrative robot ethics approaches, namely: increased attention for the way interdisciplinarity is defined in the field of robot ethics, the role and nature of ethical critique, and finally the chances integrative approaches offer for the development of more thorough anticipatory concepts.

15 Years of (Who)man Robot Interaction: Reviewing the H in Human-Robot Interaction

Recent work identified a concerning trend of disproportional gender representation in research participants in Human–Computer Interaction (HCI). Motivated by the fact that Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) shares many participant practices with HCI, we explored whether this trend is mirrored in our field. By producing a dataset covering participant gender representation in all 684 full papers published at the HRI conference from 2006–2021, we identify current trends in HRI research participation. We find an over-representation of men in research participants to date, as well as inconsistent and/or incomplete gender reporting, which typically engages in a binary treatment of gender at odds with published best practice guidelines. We further examine if and how participant gender has been considered in user studies to date, in-line with current discourse surrounding the importance and/or potential risks of gender based analyses. Finally, we complement this with a survey of HRI researchers to examine correlations between who is doing with the who is taking part, to further reflect on factors which seemingly influence gender bias in research participation across different sub-fields of HRI. Through our analysis, we identify areas for improvement, but also reason for optimism, and derive some practical suggestions for HRI researchers going forward.

Concerning Trends in Likert Scale Usage in Human-robot Interaction: Towards Improving Best Practices

As robots become more prevalent, the importance of the field of human-robot interaction (HRI) grows accordingly. As such, we should endeavor to employ the best statistical practices in HRI research. Likert scales are commonly used metrics in HRI to measure perceptions and attitudes. Due to misinformation or honest mistakes, many HRI researchers do not adopt best practices when analyzing Likert data. We conduct a review of psychometric literature to determine the current standard for Likert scale design and analysis. Next, we conduct a survey of five years of the International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRIc) (2016 through 2020) and report on incorrect statistical practices and design of Likert scales [1,2,3,5,7]. During these years, only 4 of the 144 papers applied proper statistical testing to correctly designed Likert scales. We additionally conduct a survey of best practices across several venues and provide a comparative analysis to determine how Likert practices differ across the field of Human-robot Interaction. We find that a venue’s impact score negatively correlates with number of Likert-related errors and acceptance rate, and total number of papers accepted per venue positively correlates with the number of errors. We also find statistically significant differences between venues for the frequency of misnomer and design errors. Our analysis suggests there are areas for meaningful improvement in the design and testing of Likert scales. Based on our findings, we provide guidelines and a tutorial for researchers for developing and analyzing Likert scales and associated data. We also detail a list of recommendations to improve the accuracy of conclusions drawn from Likert data.

A Study on Social Exclusion in Human-Robot Interaction

Recent research in human-robot interaction (HRI) points to possible unfair outcomes caused by artificial systems based on machine learning. The aim of this study was to investigate if people are susceptible to social exclusion shown by a robot and, if they are, how they signal the feeling of being rejected from the group. We review the research on social exclusion in the context of human–human interaction and explore its relevance for HRI. Then we present the results of our experiment to simulate social exclusion in the context of HRI: the participants (for whom it was their first encounter with a robot) and the Nao robot were asked to cooperate in solving the bomb defusal task, during which the robot favored one participant with whom it had a longer interaction before the task. The robot was controlled using the Wizard-of-Oz methodology throughout the experiment. Our results show that the discriminated participants reported a higher feeling of exclusion. Though some other hypotheses were not confirmed, we present several qualitative observations from our experiment. For example, it was noticed that the participants who behaved more openly and were more extraverted acted more comfortably when interacting with the robot.