MACHINE BEHAVIORAL TRAITS
FOR FLUENT INTERACTION WITH HUMANS
HCI graduate these study
Background
With an interest in HCI and autonomous machine, I joined Brown University's H2R lab in my graduate studies. I worked along with computer scientists, investigating robotic collaboration skills with humans. Using a Baxter robot as the subject, I designed expressions, gestures, and visual audio signals to improve robotic communication abilities.
Using the Baxter robot, I realized that much of the design work is becoming too specific to be used among many other autonomous machines. Baxter is an anthropomorphic machine, an advantage most robotic objects entering people's daily life do not have. I organized and abstracted learnings from Baxter into guidelines that can be adapted to machines with simple communication features.
I identified what abstract behavioral traits are key for robots to achieve fluently interact and collaborate with humans in a physical environment. Without over constraining the means of the communications, the traits themselves can be adopted by simpler automatous machines
Read extended design research:
Confusion
Attentiveness (Eye gaze)
Acknowledgement (Nodding)
The Social Behavior Guide for Confused Autonomous Machines
As humans, we are constantly exchanging social cues to check intentions and reach communication grounding, enabling us to interact with fluently and nuances. Without such nature, physical interaction would be will with confusion, conflicts, and awkwardness.
The Social Behavior Guide for Confused Autonomous Machines is a speculative framework that identifies and abstracts key behavioral traits that help robotic objects fluently interact with humans. This frame separates behavioral traits from communication methods, given that most machine does not share the same UI elements. Essential interaction traits are abstract and organized into 7 categories: Acknowledgments, Attentiveness, Confidence, Intention, Anticipation, Rational, and Attitude.
For more in depth work on The Social Behavior Guide, I invite your to flip through my thesis book: The Social Behavior Guide for Confused Autonomous Machines
Through reviewing and organizing my learnings from the H2R lab, I proposed seven key behavior traits autonomous machine should adopt to establish real time communication grounding such as humans do: Acknowledgments, Attentiveness, Confidence, Intention, Anticipation, Rational, and Attitude.
