Abstract
To interact and cooperate with humans in their daily-life activities, robots should exhibit human-like “intelligence”. This skill will substantially emerge from the interconnection of all the algorithms used to ensure cognitive and interaction capabilities. While new robotics technologies allow us to extend such abilities, their evaluation for social interaction is still challenging. The quality of a human–robot interaction can not be reduced to the evaluation of the employed algorithms: we should integrate the engagement information that naturally arises during interaction in response to the robot’s behaviors. In this paper we want to show a practical approach to evaluate the engagement aroused during interactions between humans and social robots. We will introduce a set of metrics useful in direct, face to face scenarios, based on the behaviors analysis of the human partners. We will show how such metrics are useful to assess how the robot is perceived by humans and how this perception changes according to the behaviors shown by the social robot. We discuss experimental results obtained in two human-interaction studies, with the robots Nao and iCub respectively.
Similar content being viewed by others
Explore related subjects
Discover the latest articles, news and stories from top researchers in related subjects.References
Admoni H, Dragan A, Srinivasa SS, Scassellati B (2014) Deliberate delays during robot-to-human handovers improve compliance with gaze communication. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, HRI ’14, pp 49–56
Andry P, Blanchard A, Gaussier P (2011) Using the rhythm of nonverbal human-robot interaction as a signal for learning. IEEE Trans Auton Ment Dev 3(1):30–42
Anzalone SM, Chetouani M (2013) Tracking posture and head movements of impaired people during interactions with robots. In: New trends in image analysis and processing-ICIAP 2013. Springer, Berlin, pp 41–49
Anzalone SM, Ghidoni S, Menegatti E, Pagello E (2013) A multimodal distributed intelligent environment for a safer home. In: Intelligent autonomous systems 12. Springer, Berlin, pp 775–785
Anzalone SM, Ivaldi S, Sigaud O, Chetouani M (2013) Multimodal people engagement with icub. In: Biologically inspired cognitive architectures 2012. Springer, Berlin, pp 59–64
Anzalone SM, Tilmont E, Boucenna S, Xavier J, Jouen AL, Bodeau N, Maharatna K, Chetouani M, Cohen D (2014) How children with autism spectrum disorder behave and explore the 4-dimensional (spatial 3d+ time) environment during a joint attention induction task with a robot. Res Autism Spectr Disord 8(7):814–826
Argall BD, Browning B, Veloso M (2011) Teacher feedback to scaffold and refine demonstrated motion primitives on a mobile robot. Robot Auton Syst 59(3–4):243–255
Baron-Cohen S (1997) Mindblindness: an essay on autism and theory of mind. MIT press, Cambridge
Bertenthal BI, Boyer TW, Han JM (2012) Social attention is not restricted to the eyes: pointing also automatically orients direction of attention. The Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Minneapolis, MN
Boucenna S, Anzalone S, Tilmont E, Cohen D, Chetouani M (2014) Learning of social signatures through imitation game between a robot and a human partner. Auton Ment Dev IEEE Trans 6(3):213–225
Boucenna S, Gaussier P, Andry P, Hafemeister L (2014) A robot learns the facial expressions recognition and face/non-face discrimination through an imitation game. Int J Soc Robot 6(4):633–652
Boucenna S, Narzisi A, Tilmont E, Muratori F, Pioggia G, Cohen D, Chetouani M (2014) Interactive technologies for autistic children: a review. Cogn Comput 6(4):1–19
Breazeal C (2003) Toward social robots. Robot Auton Syst 42:167–175
Breazeal C, Kidd CD, Thomaz AL, Hoffman G, Berlin M (2005) Effects of nonverbal communication on efficiency and robustness in human–robot teamwork. In: IEEE/RSJ international conference on intelligent robots and systems, pp 383–388
Breazeal CL (2000) Sociable machines: expressive social exchange between humans and robots. Ph.D. thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Breazeal CL (2004) Designing sociable robots. MIT press, Cambridge
Brethes L, Menezes P, Lerasle F, Hayet J (2004) Face tracking and hand gesture recognition for human–robot interaction. In: IEEE international conference on robotics and automation, vol 2. IEEE, pp 1901–1906
Brick T, Scheutz M (2007) Incremental natural language processing for hri. In: ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, HRI ’07. ACM, New York, pp 263–270
Bruner J, Feldman C (1993) Theories of mind and the problems of autism. In: Baron-Cohen SE, Tager-Flusberg HE, Cohen DJ (eds) Understanding other minds: perspectives from autism. Oxford University Press
Cantor N, Kihlstrom JF (1987) Personality and social intelligence. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs
Cantrell R, Scheutz M, Schermerhorn P, Wu X (2010) Robust spoken instruction understanding for hri. In: 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction, pp 275–282
Choi BC, Pak AW (2005) A catalog of biases in questionnaires. Prev Chronic Dis 2(1):A13
Crespi N, Molina B, Palau C et al (2011) Qoe aware service delivery in distributed environment. In: Advanced information networking and applications (WAINA), 2011 IEEE Workshops of International Conference on, pp 837–842. IEEE
Cristinacce D, Cootes T (2006) Feature detection and tracking with constrained local models. In: Proceedings of British machine vision conference, vol 3. pp 929–938
Dautenhahn K (1995) Getting to know each otherartificial social intelligence for autonomous robots. Robot Auton Syst 16(2):333–356
Dautenhahn K (2007) Socially intelligent robots: dimensions of human–robot interaction. Philos Trans R Soc B 362(1480):679–704
Delaherche E, Chetouani M, Mahdhaoui A, Saint-Georges C, Viaux S, Cohen D (2012) Interpersonal synchrony: a survey of evaluation methods across disciplines. IEEE Trans Affect Comput 3(3):349–365
Delaherche E, Dumas G, Nadel J, Chetouani M (2014) Automatic measure of imitation during social interaction: a behavioral and hyperscanning-eeg benchmark. Pattern Recognit Lett. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2014.09.002
Ekman P, Friesen WV (1981) The repertoire of nonverbal behavior: categories, origins, usage, and coding. In: Kendon A, Sebeok TA, Umiker-Sebeok J (eds) Nonverbal communication, interaction, and gesture: selections from Semiotica. Walter de Gruyter, pp 57–106
Fischer K, Lohan K, Saunders J, Nehaniv C, Wrede B, Rohlfing K (2013) The impact of the contingency of robot feedback on hri. In: Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2013 international conference on. IEEE, pp 210–217
Fong T, Nourbakhsh I, Dautenhahn K (2003) A survey of socially interactive robots. Robot Auton Syst 42:143–166
Furnham A (1986) Response bias, social desirability and dissimulation. Personality Individ Differ 7(3):385–400
Ghidoni S, Anzalone SM, Munaro M, Michieletto S, Menegatti E (2014) A distributed perception infrastructure for robot assisted living. Robot Auton Syst 62(9):1316–1328
Hall J, Tritton T, Rowe A, Pipe A, Melhuish C, Leonards U (2014) Perception of own and robot engagement in human–robot interactions and their dependence on robotics knowledge. Robot Auton Syst 62(3):392–399
Harris TK, Banerjee S, Rudnicky AI (2005) Heterogeneous multi-robot dialogues for search tasks. In: Proceedings of the AAAI spring symposium intelligence, Citeseer
Ishiguro H (2006) Interactive humanoids and androids as ideal interfaces for humans. In: Proceedings of the 11th international conference on intelligent user interfaces. ACM, New York, pp. 2–9
Ishiguro H (2007) Android science. In: Robotics research. Springer, Berlin, pp 118–127
Ishii R, Shinohara Y, Nakano T, Nishida T (2011) Combining multiple types of eye-gaze information to predict users conversational engagement. 2nd workshop on eye gaze on intelligent human machine interaction
Ivaldi S, Anzalone SM, Rousseau W, Sigaud O, Chetouani M (2014) Robot initiative in a team learning task increases the rhythm of interaction but not the perceived engagement. Front Neurorobotics 8(5):1–23
Ivaldi S, Nguyen S, Lyubova N, Droniou A, Padois V, Filliat D, Oudeyer PY, Sigaud O (2014) Object learning through active exploration. IEEE Trans Auton Ment Dev 6(1):56–72
Kamide H, Mae Y, Kawabe K, Shigemi S, Hirose M, Arai T (2012) New measurement of psychological safety for humanoid. In: Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, New York, pp. 49–56
Kamide H, Mae Y, Takubo T, Ohara K, Arai T (2010) Development of a scale of perception to humanoid robots: Pernod. In: Intelligent robots and systems (IROS), 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE, pp 5830–5835
Kaplan F, Hafner V (2004) The challenges of joint attention. Lund University Cognitive Studies, Lund
Kihlstrom JF, Cantor N (2000) Social intelligence. Handb Intell 2:359–379
Kulic D, Croft EA (2007) Affective state estimation for human–robot interaction. Robot IEEE Trans 23(5):991–1000
Laghari KUR, Connelly K (2012) Toward total quality of experience: a qoe model in a communication ecosystem. Commun Mag IEEE 50(4):58–65
Lee C, Lesh N, Sidner CL, Morency LP, Kapoor A, Darrell T (2004) Nodding in conversations with a robot. In: CHI’04 extended abstracts on human factors in computing systems. ACM, New York, pp 785–786
Lee J, Chao C, Bobick AF, Thomaz AL (2012) Multi-cue contingency detection. Int J Soc Robot 4(2):147–161
Lemaignan S, Fink J, Dillenbourg P (2014) The dynamics of anthropomorphism in robotics. In: Proceedings of the 2014 ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, New york, pp 226–227
Miller PH (2010) Theories of developmental psychology. Macmillan, London
Mower E, Feil-Seifer DJ, Mataric MJ, Narayanan S (2007) Investigating implicit cues for user state estimation in human–robot interaction using physiological measurements. In: The 16th IEEE international symposium on robot and human interactive communication, 2007 (RO-MAN 2007). IEEE, pp 1125–1130
Natale L, Nori F, Metta G, Fumagalli M, Ivaldi S, Pattacini U, Randazzo M, Schmitz A, Sandini G (2012) Intrinsically motivated learning in natural and artificial systems, chap. The iCub platform: a tool for studying intrinsically motivated learning. Springer, Berlin
Nickerson RS (1998) Confirmation bias: a ubiquitous phenomenon in many guises. Rev Gen Psychol 2(2):175
Obhi SS, Sebanz N (2011) Moving together: toward understanding the mechanisms of joint action. Exp Brain Res 211(3):329–336
O’Brien HL, Toms EG (2008) What is user engagement? A conceptual framework for defining user engagement with technology. J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 59(6):938–955
Payne SL (1951) The art of asking questions. Princeton University Press, Princeton
Raake A, Egger S (2014) Quality and quality of experience. In: Quality of experience. Springer, Berlin, pp 11–33
Rich C, Ponsler B, Holroyd A, Sidner CL (2010) Recognizing engagement in human–robot interaction. In: Proceedings of ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction (HRI). ACM Press, New York, pp 375–382
Rousseau W, Anzalone SM, Chetouani M, Sigaud O, Ivaldi S (2013) Learning object names through shared attention. In: IROS-Int. workshop on developmental social robotics. pp 1–6
Sanghvi J, Castellano G, Leite I, Pereira A, McOwan PW, Paiva A (2011) Automatic analysis of affective postures and body motion to detect engagement with a game companion. In: 6th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, New York, pp 305–311
Scassellati B (2005) Quantitative metrics of social response for autism diagnosis. In: IEEE international workshop on robot and human interactive communication, 2005 (ROMAN 2005). IEEE, pp 585–590
Scassellati B (2007) How social robots will help us to diagnose, treat, and understand autism. In: Robotics research. Springer, Berlin, pp 552–563
Short E, Hart J, Vu M, Scassellati B (2010) No fair!! an interaction with a cheating robot. In: 5th ACM/IEEE international conference on human–robot interaction. ACM, New York, pp 219–226
Shotton J, Sharp T, Kipman A, Fitzgibbon A, Finocchio M, Blake A, Cook M, Moore R (2013) Real-time human pose recognition in parts from single depth images. Commun ACM 56(1):116–124
Sidner C, Lee C, Kidds C, Lesh N, Rich C (2005) Explorations in engagement for humans and robots. Artif Intell 166(1):140–164
Sidner CL, Kidd CD, Lee C, Lesh N (2004) Where to look: a study of human–robot engagement. In: Proceedings of the 9th international conference on intelligent user interfaces. ACM, New York, pp 78–84
Tapus A, Mataric M, Scasselati B (2007) Socially assistive robotics [grand challenges of robotics]. IEEE Robot Autom Mag 14(1):35–42
Thorndike EL (1920) Intelligence and its uses. Harper’s magazine, New York
Tomasello M (1995) Joint attention as social cognition. In: Moore C, Dunham PJ (eds) Joint attention: its origins and role in development. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. pp 103–130
Tomasello M, Farrar MJ (1986) Joint attention and early language. Child Dev 57:1454–1463
Vaussard F, Fink J, Bauwens V, Retornaz P, Hamel D, Dillenbourg P, Mondada F (2014) Lessons learned from robotic vacuum cleaners entering the home ecosystem. Robot Auton Syst 62(3):376–391
Vázquez M, May A, Steinfeld A, Chen WH (2011) A deceptive robot referee in a multiplayer gaming environment. In: International conference on Collaboration Technologies and Systems (CTS), 2011. IEEE, pp 204–211
Vernon PE (1933) Some characteristics of the good judge of personality. J Soc Psychol 4(1):42–57
Vinciarelli A, Pantic M, Bourlard H (2009) Social signal processing: survey of an emerging domain. Image Vis Comput 27(12):1743–1759
Vinciarelli A, Pantic M, Heylen D, Pelachaud C, Poggi I, D’Errico F, Schröder M (2012) Bridging the gap between social animal and unsocial machine: a survey of social signal processing. IEEE Trans Affect Comput 3(1):69–87
Weisman O, Delaherche E, Rondeau M, Chetouani M, Cohen D, Feldman R (2013) Oxytocin shapes parental motion during father-infant interaction. Biol Lett. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2013.0828
Yannakakis GN, Hallam J, Lund HH (2008) Entertainment capture through heart rate activity in physical interactive playgrounds. User Model User-Adapt Inter 18(1–2):207–243
Zhao S (2003) Toward a taxonomy of copresence. Presence 12(5):445–455
Zhao W, Chellappa R, Phillips PJ, Rosenfeld A (2003) Face recognition: a literature survey. ACM Comput Surv 35(4):399–458
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the Investissiments d’Avenir program (SMART ANR-11-IDEX-0004-02) through Project EDHHI/SMART, the ANR Project Pramad, and by the European Commission, within the projects CoDyCo (FP7-ICT-2011-9, No. 600716) and and Michelangelo Project (FP7-ICT No.288241).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Anzalone, S.M., Boucenna, S., Ivaldi, S. et al. Evaluating the Engagement with Social Robots. Int J of Soc Robotics 7, 465–478 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0298-7
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0298-7