Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to (shared memories), and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter (shared friends). In this paper, we are presenting such a robot, which as we will see achieves two significant novelties.
Deep Dive into FaceBots: Steps Towards Enhanced Long-Term Human-Robot Interaction by Utilizing and Publishing Online Social Information.
Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that they can co-refer to (shared memories), and if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they both know and encounter (shared friends). In this paper, we are presenting such a robot, which as we will see achieves two significant novelties.
FaceBots: Steps Towards Enhanced Long-Term
Human-Robot Interaction by Utilizing and
Publishing Online Social Information
Nikolaos Mavridis∗, Shervin Emami∗, Chandan Datta∗, Wajahat Kazmi∗,
Chiraz BenAbdelkader†, Panos Toulis‡, Andry Tanoto§, Tamer Rabie∗
∗Interactive Robots and Media Lab, CIT, Maqam Campus, UAE University
Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, Email: irmluaeu@gmail.com
†New York Institute of Technology, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Email: chiraz@nyit.edu
‡Aristotle University, Thessaloniki, Greece
Email: ptoulis@olympus.ee.auth.gr
§Heinz-Nixdorf Institute, University of Paderborn, Paderborn, Germany
Email: Andry.Tanoto@hni.uni-paderborn.de
Abstract— Our project aims at supporting the creation of sus-
tainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships
through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition
and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and
publish social information available on the web (Facebook). Our
main underlying experimental hypothesis is that such relation-
ships can be significantly enhanced if the human and the robot
are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic memories that
they can co-refer to (“shared memories”), and if they are both
embedded in a social web of other humans and robots they
both know and encounter (“shared friends”). In this paper, we
are presenting such a robot, which as we will see achieves two
significant novelties.
I. INTRODUCTION
The main problem addressed by this project is that of
the creation of sustainable and meaningful long-term human
robot relationships. This is a most important problem towards
our ultimate goal of human-robot symbiosis, i.e. harmonious
and mutually beneficial living together of the two species. In
the shorter term, this is an important problem towards the
successful application of robots to numerous areas: disabled
and elderly assistance / companionship, supporting education,
and more. So far, empirical investigations have shown that
we have not advanced significantly yet towards its solution:
Although existing robotic systems are interesting to interact
with in the short term, it has been shown that after some weeks
of quasi-regular encounters, humans gradually lose their in-
terest, and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships
are not established. For example, in the case of Robovie [1],
there was a steady and significant decrease in the total time
of interaction of the robot with humans over six months -
interest had worn off. Our proposed solution to the problem
of creating sustainable and meaningful long-term human robot
relationships is based on an underlying hypothesis: That such
relationships can be significantly enhanced if the human and
the robot are gradually creating a pool of shared episodic
memories that they can co-refer to (”shared memories”), and
if they are both embedded in a social web of other humans
and robots they both know and encounter (“shared friends”).
Thus, here we present a conversational mobile robot with face
recognition that is connected to Facebook, a highly successful
online networking resource for humans, towards enhancing
longer-term human robot relationships, by helping to address
the above two prerequisites. The contribution to the field of
the project is expected to be significant. Apart from many
tangential side-gains elaborated in the discussion section, our
system achieves two important novelties: being the first such
robot that is embedded in a social web, and being the first robot
that can purposefully exploit and create social information
that is available online. Furthermore, it is expected to provide
empirical support for our main driving hypothesis, that the
formation of shared episodic memories within a social web can
lead to more meaningful long-term human-robot relationships.
The experience gained by the creation of such a system as well
as the software created is invaluable towards providing similar
capabilities to other robots, and as a starting point for further
enhancements of robots truly embedded in a social web that
use and create online social information. Finally, the exposure
of the robot to Facebook, through the public availability of
its own Facebook page containing its friends and experiences
as well as photos, will create public interest that will further
support endeavours to similar directions in the future.
II. RELATED RESEARCH
Although numerous attempts towards interactive social
robots have taken place (Kismet [2], Leonardo [3], Maggie
[4], Robovies [5] and more), no existing systems have utilized
a connection between robots and Facebook. However, face-
detecting conversational robots are not new; there are numer-
ous projects built-around face-detecting robots [6],[7], which
might even carry out conversations with multiple humans,
such as in [8]. Regarding the sustainability of human-robot
relationships, a key long-term (six month) study is [1]. Shorter
field studies in other contexts have taken place in the past; for
example
…(Full text truncated)…
This content is AI-processed based on ArXiv data.
