The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Even if a socially interactive robot has perfect information about the location, pose, and movement of humans in the environment, it is unclear how this information should be used to enable the initiation, maintenance, and termination of social interactions. We review models that have been developed to describe social engagement based on spatial relationships and describe a system developed for use on a robotic recep- tionist. The system uses spatial information from a laser tracker and head pose information from a camera to classify people in a categorical model of engagement. The robot's behaviors are determined by the presence of people in these different levels. We evaluate the system using observational behavioral analysis of recorded interactions between the robot and humans. This analysis suggests improvements to the current system: namely, to put a stonger emphasis on movement in the estimation of social engagement and to vary the timing of interactive behaviors.

Notes

Associated Center(s) / Consortia: Vision and Autonomous Systems Center and Quality of Life Technology Center

Associated Lab(s) / Group(s): Reliable Autonomous Systems Lab and Human-Robot Interaction Group

Associated Project(s): Social Robots and Roboceptionist

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Marek Piotr Michalowski, S. Sabanovic, and Reid Simmons, "A spatial model of engagement for a social robot," Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control (AMC 2006), March, 2006, pp. 762 - 767.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Michalowski_2006_5629,
   author = "Marek Piotr Michalowski and S. Sabanovic and Reid Simmons",
   title = "A spatial model of engagement for a social robot",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 9th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control (AMC 2006)",
   pages = "762 - 767",
   publisher = "IEEE",
   month = "March",
   year = "2006",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu