Robots in my Contact List: Using Social Media Platforms for Human-Robot Interaction in Domestic Environment

Robots in my Contact List: Using Social Media Platforms for Human-Robot Interaction in Domestic Environment

Authors

Xiaoning Ma, Xin Yang, Shengdong Zhao, Chi-Wing Fu, Ziquan Lan, Yiming Pu

Paper

Abstract

This paper proposes to put domestic robots as buddies on our contact lists, thereby extending the use of social media in interpersonal interaction further to human-robot interaction (HRI). In detail, we present a robot management system that employs complementary social media platforms for human to interact with the vacuuming robot Roomba, and a surveillance robot which is developed in this paper on top of an iRobot Create. The social media platforms adopted include short message services (SMS), instant messenger (MSN), online shared calendar (Google Calendar), and social networking site (Facebook). Hence, our system can provide a rich set of user-familiar, intuitive and highly-accessible interfaces, allowing users to flexibly choose their preferred tools in different situations. An in-lab experiment and a multi-day field study are also conducted to study the characteristics and strengths of each interface, and to investigate the users’ perception to the robots and behaviors in choosing the interfaces during the course of HRI.

Categories and Subject Descriptors

H.5.2. User Interfaces – [Interaction styles]; I.2.9 Robotics – [Commercial robots and applications]

General Terms

Human Factors, Experimentation.

Keywords

Human-robot interaction, domestic robots, social media platforms, intuitive interaction.

Presentation

Video

Shen

Shen is an HCI professor at the National University of Singapore working on realizing his vision of HeadsUp Computing, a new Interaction paradigm that can transform the way we live and interact with computers. In his free time, Shen loves to read, run, spend time with family and friends, and explore nature.

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