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Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Prediction of Human Behavior in Human – Robot Interaction Using Psychological Scales for Anxiety and Negative Attitudes Toward Robots


Tatsuya Nomura, Takayuki Kanda, Tomoshiro Suzuki, Kensuke Kato
IEEE Transactions on Robotics, Vol. 24, No. 2, April 2008
Summary
                  Robot are being capable to operate more and more together with humans, but still it may be into account that not all people may accept novel robots, as for Joinson (2002), opinions toward novel communication technologies tend to be highly polarized, so people might have negative attitudes and emotions toward novel robots. Studies have been done to understand the effects of human robot interaction on humans’ behavior, but non of them has addressed which kind of person might have difficulties in relating with robots and investigations on which kind of negative attitudes or emotions haven’t been done. The authors focus on anxiety and negative attitudes toward robots. In psychology attitude is defined as a relatively stable and enduring predisposition to behave in a certain way toward other people or element surrounding, while anxiety is defined as an apprehension state of the future about a specific fear. Anxiety is classified in trait anxiety (the trend of anxiety as a stable characteristic) and state anxiety (which is transiently evoked in specific situation that change according on situation and time). NARS is developed to determine human attitudes towards robots, the authors investigates mainly 3 possible states: S1) negative attitude toward social influence of robots; S2) Negative attitude toward the social influence of robots; S3) negative attitude toward emotional interaction with robots. A questionnaire has been performed (page 444). RAS is developed for measuring human anxiety toward robots evoked in real and imaginary HRI situations, in this case the these possible states issued are: S1) Anxiety toward communication capacity of robots; S2) Anxiety toward behavioral characteristics of robots; S3) Anxiety toward discourse with robots. Also in this case a questionnaire has been performed. Computer anxiety could be associated with robot anxiety, although it is a kind of state anxiety, while robot anxiety is only weakly correlated with state anxiety. These psychological scales in HRI may been useful, if we consider for example Friedman et. Al analyzed analyzed online discussion on the Aibo forum and found that people are not enthusiastic about a robotic dog, but are aware it’s a robot while interacting with it.  The authors performed an experiment on university student in Japan using “Robovie”, a human-like robot designed for communication with robots and provided with different kind of sensor systems. The experiment involved the subjects compile the questionnaire for NARS and RAS, walk into the room where the robot was and greet it, they were asked to enter in the room alone and move in front of the robot, then they had to talk for 30 seconds with the robot, after which Robotvie would interact with the subjects asking questions, after the answer the subjects would be asked to touch the robot. At the end of the experiment each subject was asked to respond the RAS once again to check differences with the previously answered survey. Parameters to be tested appear to be: D) distance from the robot at first sight; U1) time before subject talked after entering the room; U2) time after which the subject replied to the robot; T) time before the subject touched the robot.
Key Concepts
Human Robot Interaction, Effect of Robot on Human behavior
Key Results
The experiments shows that for that: male have positive relations between U1 and RAS-S3, T and RAS-S1, T and RAS-S2 and negative influence is between U1 and NARS-S1, T and NARS-S3 and also NARS-S2, although not statistically significant. For women positive influence is between D and RAS-S1 ad NARS-S1, NARS-S3 and U2 and negatively between D and NARS-S2. No significant different was therefore noted between genders. Subjects with emotional utterances toward robots were found with higher negative attitude and anxiety toward interaction with robots than those with no-emotional utterances. Some correlation per gender were find between NARS and RAS. The paper demonstrates influence attitude have from robotics. 

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