HCC: Small: Social Agents and Robots for Open-Ended Domains

HCC：小型：开放领域的社交代理和机器人

• 批准号: 1320520
• 负责人: Brian Magerko
• 金额: $ 49.78万
• 依托单位: Georgia Tech Research Corporation
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-08-15 至 2018-01-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1320520&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: HCC; Small; Social; Agents; Robots

Recreational activity is a fundamental aspect of human existence and an important part of the human condition within familial and social groups, where it serves to strengthen social ties by increasing affect between individuals and as a form of education in creative thinking. Despite a sizable accumulation of knowledge about such activity from sociology, anthropology, and psychology, "play" as a first-class concept has not been studied through the lens of computation. When today's agents engage with humans, they do so in the context of structured environments and are highly dependent on well-defined goals and/or behaviors. Contrast this to the domain of pretend play, which involves non-goal directed peer-to-peer activity in a shared imaginary second reality that is continually altered. Pretend play is a common form of engagement that is relevant to an array of social domains, such as elder care, peer learning, or social skills therapy for children with autism spectrum disorders. The PI's goal in this research is to imbue robot systems with procedural and declarative representations of play so that they are capable of engaging in such activity with humans as peers. The work aims to discover how to develop humanoid robots with the ability to engage, improvise, and create with humans in unstructured environments. Such robot capability would foster perceptions of lifelikeness, social acceptance, and companionship similar to the experience of playing with other people. These agents would encourage spirited behaviors and creativity in people. They would elicit high levels of interest, intrinsic motivation, and positive affect, which in turn would lead to better concentration, learning, and personal investment by the human participant. To achieve these goals, the PI will leverage his prior work on creativity and cognition to conduct a study of adults engaging in object-based pretend play to elicit a formal understanding of it in dyads. The findings will subsequently be applied to building social robots that engage, based on the team's expertise in human-centered AI and human-robot interaction. The resulting robot architecture will be evaluated to see how it can enhance robot affect and social acceptance. Broader Impacts: This research will create a new academic research direction of Computational Play within the field of social robotics that has the potential to contribute a solid and unique advance to the field, and also to change how we interact with intelligent agents thereby increasing agents' social value and acceptance by the humans around them. The work will increase via empirical study our understanding of human engagement, and in particular of the knowledge and social dynamics involved in pretend scenarios. The playful robots to be designed, implemented and formally evaluated in this work will inform the human-robot interaction community as to how such activity can be used within HRI contexts to increase affect. This work also has the potential of improving the learning and creativity of those that interact with social agents, making computational play a valuable research direction for education. The project will provide a fertile ground for interdisciplinary training of graduate and undergraduate students, and a wealth of interaction data that will be shared with the scientific community.

休闲活动是人类生存的一个基本方面，也是家庭和社会群体中人类状况的一个重要组成部分，它通过增加个人之间的影响和作为创造性思维教育的一种形式来加强社会联系。尽管社会学、人类学和心理学对游戏的研究已经积累了相当多的知识，但游戏作为一个一流的概念，还没有从计算的透镜来研究。当今天的智能体与人类互动时，它们是在结构化环境的背景下进行的，并且高度依赖于明确定义的目标和/或行为。这与假装游戏的领域形成对比，假装游戏涉及在一个不断改变的共同想象的第二现实中的非目标导向的对等活动。假装游戏是一种常见的参与形式，与一系列社会领域有关，例如老年人护理，同伴学习或自闭症谱系障碍儿童的社交技能治疗。PI在这项研究中的目标是向机器人系统灌输游戏的程序和声明性表示，以便它们能够与人类作为同伴参与此类活动。这项工作的目的是发现如何开发人形机器人，使其能够在非结构化环境中与人类进行互动、即兴创作和创造。这样的机器人能力将培养逼真的感知，社会接受和友谊，类似于与其他人一起玩的体验。这些代理人将鼓励人们的精神行为和创造力。它们会引起高度的兴趣，内在动机和积极的影响，这反过来又会导致人类参与者更好的注意力，学习和个人投资。为了实现这些目标，PI将利用他以前在创造力和认知方面的工作，对参与基于对象的假装游戏的成年人进行研究，以引起对二人组的正式理解。研究结果随后将应用于构建基于团队在以人为中心的人工智能和人机交互方面的专业知识的社交机器人。由此产生的机器人架构将进行评估，看看它如何可以提高机器人的影响和社会接受。更广泛的影响：这项研究将在社会机器人领域创造一个新的学术研究方向，即计算游戏，有可能为该领域做出坚实而独特的进步，并改变我们与智能代理的互动方式，从而提高代理的社会价值和周围人类的接受度。这项工作将通过实证研究增加我们对人类参与的理解，特别是假装场景中涉及的知识和社会动态。在这项工作中设计，实施和正式评估的好玩的机器人将告知人机交互社区如何在HRI环境中使用这种活动来增加影响。这项工作也有可能提高那些与社会代理人互动的人的学习和创造力，使计算游戏成为教育的一个有价值的研究方向。该项目将为研究生和本科生的跨学科培训提供肥沃的土壤，并将与科学界共享丰富的交互数据。