Italy

Adolescents isolated at home during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown are more likely to feel lonely and in need of social connection. Social robots may provide a much needed social interaction without the risk of contracting an infection. In this paper, we detail our co-design process used to engage adolescents in the design of a social robot prototype intended to broadly support their mental health. Data gathered from our four week design study of nine remote sessions and interviews with 16 adolescents suggested the following design requirements for a home robot: (1) be able to enact a set of roles including a coach, companion, and confidant; (2) amplify human-to-human connection by supporting peer relationships; (3) account for data privacy and device ownership. Design materials are available in open-access, contributing to best practices for the field of Human-Robot Interaction.

IEEE RO-MAN 2022

Robots for Connection: A Co-Design Study with Adolescents

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

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31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

technical paper

The role of social robots as advisors for decision
making is investigated. It has been consistently shown that when
asked to rank options, people often make fallacious judgements.
Furthermore, such fallacies can be sensitive to presentation
mode.We study whether having social robot advisors presenting
options can mitigate and reduce the fallacy rates of participants.
For this purpose we explored a novel presentation mode of
options with conjunction judgmental fallacy, namely, choosing
among different rank-orders, as opposed to rank the options
themselves.We first show that the mere presentation mode has a
significant mitigating effect on the fallacy rates.We then further
show that when social robot advisors present the rank-orders,
the fallacy rates of participants significantly decrease even
further. Moreover, participants perceive the fallacious robot as
more likeable and intelligent, but assign the non-fallacious robot
to trustworthy roles, such as jury and analyst. These results
suggest that social robot advisors may be used to influence and
mitigate human fallacious judgmental decision making.

Mitigating Judgmental Fallacies with Social Robot Advisors

When acting together with another agent, humans form shared representations with their partner, in order to predict and adjust to their partner’s behaviors and ensure a smooth and efficient joint action. Previous work has shown that humans do not form shared representations when acting with partners that are not perceived as intentional, such as computers or robots. In the current study, we investigated whether engaging in a complementary joint action task with the humanoid robot iCub could influence the perceived intentionality of the robot. Participants completed a target tracking and detection task with iCub, in which they had to act together with the robot to achieve a shared goal. Participants’ likelihood of perceiving the robot as intentional was assessed before and after the interaction. Results showed that participants were more likely to perceive iCub as an intentional agent after they shared a task with it, suggesting that interacting with a robot to achieve a common goal promotes intentionality attribution toward the robot.

A Benchmark Toolkit for Collaborative Human-Robot Interaction

Autonomous vehicles have an existential communication challenge due to the lack of need for a human driver who can signal to vulnerable road users nearby about the intentions of the vehicle. This presents an opportunity for a vehicle to vulnerable road user communication system, such as for bicyclists. Enabling communication between bicyclists and autonomous vehicles will lead to an improvement of the bicyclists' safety in autonomous driving. If a bicyclist wants to pass the autonomous vehicle, the autonomous vehicle should provide feedback to the human about what it is about to do and what it would like the person to do. The user study presented in this paper investigated several possible options for an external display for effective nonverbal communication between an autonomous vehicle and a bicyclist. 
The results were compared to our recent study concerning vehicle-to-pedestrian communication. In total 208 participants were recruited for the vehicle-to-walker and vehicle-to-bicyclist feedback module studies.
The results did not show significant differences between the communication modalities presented. This paper shows and discusses differences between vehicle-to-walker and vehicle-to-bicyclist feedback modules. It is plausible to use the same combination of interaction modes, symbols and text, as for the vehicle-to-pedestrian communication feedback module due to economic reasons.
This study shows the necessity for more immersive environments to study vehicle to bicyclist communication needs in more detail.

Measuring Visual Social Engagement from Proxemics and Gaze

Drowsiness is one of the major causes of accidents in
driving and other tasks. Therefore, finding effective ways
to prevent drowsiness and to maintain their alert state is
an important subject of study in human-machine systems such
as autonomous driving. 
In this paper, we show the potential to use a social robot
to prevent participants from becoming drowsy and to keep
them alert. Twenty-five participants were asked to perform
Sustained Attention to Response Tasks (SART) and report
their subjective drowsiness levels. When the system
detected drowsiness from the task reaction time or the
self-reports, one of the following awakening alarms was
triggered: (1) sound and the robot's movement (SRM), (2)
sound from (motionless) robot (SR), (3) sound only (no
robot present) (SO), or (4) no stimulus (NS), as a control.
The participants' task performance and self-reported
drowsiness were continuously recorded to evaluate the
effectiveness of each alarm condition. The experimental
results showed a significant difference in the
self-reported scores of drowsiness between the SRM and SR
conditions and the NS condition, while significance was not
found between the SO and NS conditions. In addition, the
response time was shorter for SRM. The difference between
SR and SO is only the presence of the social robot, so
these results indicate that the presence of the social
robot increases the participants’ alertness level.

AugRE: Augmented Robot Environment to Facilitate Human-Robot Teaming and Communication

Socially assistive robots (SAR) are conceived to improve the quality of life by better assisting people in need, when
it comes to rehabilitation, convalescence, learning etc. In this
paper we explore how patients could cohabit with a socially assistive robot in rehabilitation centers. We presented a qualitative analysis of eight patients living with Pepper robot
during a week’s time. The data come from videos of daily interactions between the patients and Pepper, patients’ journal diaries and daily reports written by the medical staff. Our analysis proposes an understanding on what worked in terms of a potential relationship between patients and Pepper, while the robot was still under development. Our study shows that notions like patience, politeness, and a general positive appreciation of
the design of the robot create a social presence for the residents of the reeducation center

JAHRVIS, a Supervision System for Human-Robot Collaboration

In the context of an aging population, technological tools such as socially assistive robots (SARs) have made their appearance as tools to assist the work practices of care teams in contact with the elderly. We want to show the contribution of user tests in a Living Lab in the process of co-designing such tools. These tests allow both technical problems to be highlighted and Human-Robot Interactions (HRI) to be studied in an iterative way. We conducted tests with elderly users as well as teenagers, to analyze the strategies used by users of the system. This also allowed us to observe the first emotional reaction and the first interaction modality (tactile or vocal) provoked by robot. Based on these observations, we propose perspectives for a better HRI.

Cooperative and Uncooperative Behaviour in Task-oriented Dialogues with Social Robots

The success of the interaction between the robotics community and the users of these services is an aspect of considerable importance in the drafting of the development plan of any technology. This aspect becomes even more relevant when dealing with sensitive services and issues such as those related to interaction with specific subgroups of any population. Over the years, there have been few successes in integrating and proposing technologies related to deafness and sign language. Instead, in this paper, we propose an account of successful interaction between a signatory robot and the Italian deaf community, which occurred during the Smart City Robotics Challenge (SciRoc) 2021 competition \footnote{https://sciroc.org/}. Thanks to the use of a participatory design and the involvement of experts belonging to the deaf community from the early stages of the project, it was possible to create a technology that has achieved significant results in terms of acceptance by the community itself and could lead to significant results in the technology development as well.

An Autonomous Conversational Android that Acquires Human-Item Co-Occurrence in the Real World

Emotional expressivity is essential for successful
Human-Robot Interaction. However, robots often have different
levels of expressivity in their face and voice. Here we ask
whether this modality mismatch influences human behaviour
and perception of the robot. Participants played a cooperative
task with a robot that displayed matched and mismatched
smiling expressions in the face and voice. Emotional expressivity
did not influence acceptance of robot’s recommendations or
subjective evaluations of the robot. However, we found that
the robot had overall a higher social influence than a virtual
character, and was evaluated more positively.

Usability of an Immersive Control System for a Humanoid Robot Surrogate

Individuals living with cognitive impairments are faced with unique challenges in completing important activities of daily living such as dressing. In this paper, we present the first socially assistive robot-wearable sensors system to provide dressing assistance through social human-robot interactions. A novel robot-wearable architecture is development to classify, prompt and provide feedback on user dressing actions. Namely, strain sensor based smart clothing on the user are used for joint angle mapping, which are then classified into different dressing steps. The robot uses a MAXQ hierarchical learning method to learn assistive behaviors to aid a user with the sequence of dressing steps. Experiments were validated the performance of the joint angle mapping model, dressing action classifier, and behavior adaptation modules as well as the overall system for dressing assistance.

Self-Disclosure to a Robot “In-the-Wild”: Category, Human Personality and Robot Identity

A psycho-physical experiment using constant method was conducted to investigate the characteristics of pseudo force sensation caused by pressurization to a palm. Kinesthetic force stimulus and tactile pressure stimulus were given to a subject at the same time, and their effect on force perception was investigated. Previous studies have reported two contradicting results regarding whether the strength of pseudo force sensation depends on the pressure or on the total amount of force. This paper further investigated this aspect using three types of indenters which differ in shape and width. The results suggested that the pseudo force sensation does not depend on total force. This, however, does not simply mean that the sensation depends on the pressure and the need for further investigations remains. The results found significant differences among subjects but also suggested that the narrower indenter with an integrated body is less susceptible to individual differences among subjects.

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