CAREER: Designing Socially Adept Robots

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Robots hold the promise of delivering significant social contributions in such key domains as education, rehabilitation, and collaboration, but to achieve this promise they must be able to communicate effectively with people. The goal of this project is to design effective social behaviors for robots by modeling human verbal, vocal, and nonverbal behavior using computational tools, regenerating them in robots, and evaluating their effectiveness in human-robot studies in social scenarios such as storytelling, interview, conversation, instruction, and collaborative work. The research will follow an interdisciplinary approach, combining computational and social-scientific methods toward advancing the state of the art in robotic technology.Intellectual Merit: The research will create a set of design specifications that robot designers can use to create robots that effectively communicate with people. These specifications will be openly disseminated to robot designers and researchers as modules for the open-source Robot Operating System (ROS). The project will also lead to new computational tools that will enable modeling human behavior and synthesizing effective behaviors for robots. In addition, this research will contribute to social science by providing a more detailed, computational understanding of human social behavior. Broader Impacts: The research will enable robots to communicate more effectively with people in such critical domains as education, collaborative work, and health and wellbeing. The projects will also introduce computational tools into areas that have not yet substantially benefited from advancements in computer technology, such as the diagnosis and treatment of autism and traumatic brain injury. Through an integrated education and outreach program, this project will also contribute to interdisciplinary education, undergraduate and graduate curricula, K-12 and special education, public understanding of science and technology, and further inclusion of minorities and children with disabilities in scientific research and education.