Project information

This is HRI page for the KALFA

Here, I will share my experience and Human Robot Interaction part of KALFA. Please see the github page for details of the KALFA.

Robots are cold metal co-workers for us. Yet, is this the destiny of them? We do not think so. Therefore, we look for ways to make robot arms more pleasant and responsive companions for workers. In that direction, we found that [paper link] some animation princibles taken from Disney increase socialability of the robot arms. Nevertheless, there was a tiny problem. Robot was not responsive to the human. There was a Wizard of Oz who controls the experiments and decides what to do on the behalf of robot.

There, my task begins. We picked two promising animation princible namely gazing and breathing. Gazing is looking at somewhere. However, robot arm has no eyes to look anywhere. Thus, we use it's gripper (the big black part at the tip of the robot). Gripper direction manipulates the attention of the human partner of the robot. It makes human sense that robot is gazing at a point. As you guess, pointing a point with gripper's direction is the gazing.

Here comes the breathing. If you imagine how human looks when breathing you see his/her chest moves up and down slightly. Unfortunately, robot again has no ability to stretch, unlike human. Yet, what it has is two long links (see shining long metals) close to the its base. There we can use them to create imaginary volume like there exists a lung. Then, we stretch and relax that imaginary volume by small ossilationary moves.

I conducted an experiment with 57 participants where participants control the experiment flow. That means they can interact with the robot as much as they desire. As an example, one interaction is doing mutual gaze. Mutual gaze is the interaction when human looks at the robot and robot looks at the human. There are other interactions and also breathing in the experiment. The paper was set off, stay tuned to see details. Nonetheless, since you read untill here, people likes gazing and breathing as a result. Moreover, the helmet and the bracelet at the photos are used to track participants moves. If you wonder how I track and use them, I can say briefly I use motion capture cameras at the top.