HCC: Medium: Collaborative Research: The Social Medium is the Message

“这个奖项是根据2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助的。”在这个项目中，PI将在人类高度依赖机器人作为外部世界媒介的情况下调查人与机器人的互动，如紧急响应、人质谈判和医疗保健。在这些领域中，人类的“依赖者”通常连接到多个其他人类的“控制者”(医学专家、结构工程师、救援行动官员等)。通过机器人代理长时间使用。文献表明，在这些情况下，依赖者会对机器人做出社交反应，并会对机器人产生不信任和认知上的困惑，因为机器人对不同的控制器表现出不同的影响，而不是一致的沟通策略。PI们认为，这样的机器人将在计算机作为社会参与者(CASA)模型中占据一个新的“社交媒体”位置，并将被视为忠诚和有用的中间人，是依赖者的倡导者，而不是实现控制器目标的设备。为了探索这一假设，PI将使用Survivor Buddy，这是一个用于机器人的多媒体附件，允许被困受害者进行双向视频会议、观看新闻、听音乐等。形成性实验将在斯坦福大学的CHAME实验室进行，随后将在德克萨斯州A&A；M的灾难城进行全面的高保真实验，使用之前与医生和救援专业人员合作开发的伤点护理脚本。相关交流策略的副语言方面将把NASS正在进行的语音特征和行为方式方面的工作与墨菲正在开发的非拟人化机器人的情感身体行为研究结合在一起；因此，该项目的智力价值来自于它对传播学和计算机科学的多学科融合。这项研究将引入CASA关系谱作为以机器人为中心的分类的补充，并将定义一种新的关系，其中人类长期高度依赖一种媒介以及新的社交媒体身份，PI预计这将对将机器人融入社会产生比自主社交行为者和远程操作更大的影响。项目成果将包括为HRI创建一个正式和全面的沟通策略，它结合了语言和非语言的影响；这将统一社交机器人的理论和实践，从而打破目前在机器人学文献中看到的特别应用情感的模式，并建立继续进行HRI基础研究的基本模型和范例：该项目最终将有助于拯救事故、灾难和恐怖主义的受害者的生命，并将全面提高“闭门造车”的生活质量。社交媒体的概念与民用和军用机器人目前的远程操作和半自主能力非常匹配；因此，制定的通信战略将立即适用于目前使用机器人的执法和紧急反应等领域，以及医疗保健领域，在这些领域，机器人尚未找到强大的经济利基市场，但具有巨大的经济潜力。教育外展计划包括多学科课程开发，以及与K-12教师和博物馆的外展。

"This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5)."In this project the PIs will investigate human-robot interaction in situations where a human is highly dependent upon a robot that serves as the medium for the outside world, such as emergency response, hostage negotiation, and healthcare. In these domains, the human "dependent" is typically connected to multiple other human "controllers" (medical specialists, structural engineers, rescue operations officials, etc.) via the robot proxy for long periods of time. The literature suggests that under these circumstances the dependent will respond to the robot socially, and will become distrustful as well as cognitively confused by a robot that presents a different affect for different controllers rather than a consistent communication strategy. The PIs believe that such a robot would occupy a novel "social medium" position within the Computers as Social Actors (CASA) model, and would be perceived as a loyal and helpful go-between who is an advocate for the dependent rather than as a device for accomplishing the goals of the controllers. To explore this hypothesis, the PIs will make use of the Survivor Buddy, a multimedia attachment for a robot which allows trapped victims to engage in two-way video conferencing, watch news, listen to music, etc. Formative experiments will be conducted at Stanford's CHIMe lab, followed by comprehensive, high fidelity experiments at Texas A&M's Disaster City using point-of-injury care scripts developed under prior work with medical doctors and rescue professionals. The paralinguistic aspects of the associated communication strategy will couple the ongoing work by Nass in voice characteristics and mannerisms with research in affective physical mannerisms in non-anthropomorphic robots under development by Murphy; the intellectual merit of the project thus stems from its multidisciplinary merging of communications and computer science. The research will introduce the CASA spectrum of relationships as a complement to robot-centric taxonomies, and will define a new relationship where a human is highly dependent upon a medium for long durations along with a new identity of social medium, which the PIs expect will have a greater impact on integrating robots into society than autonomous social actors and tele-operation. Project outcomes will include creation of a formal and comprehensive communication strategy for HRI, which combines verbal and nonverbal affect; this will unify the theory and practice of social robots, thereby breaking the pattern of ad hoc application of affect currently seen in the robotics literature and establishing the fundamental models and paradigms for continuing basic research in HRI.Broader Impacts: This project will ultimately help save the lives of victims of accidents, disasters, and terrorism, and will also generally improve the quality of life for "shut-ins." The concept of social medium is well-matched to the current capabilities of tele-operation and semi-autonomy in civilian and military robotics; thus, the communication strategies developed will be immediately applicable to domains such as law enforcement and emergency response, which currently use robots, as well as to healthcare, where robots have not yet found a strong economic niche but have huge economic potential. The educational outreach plan includes multi-disciplinary curriculum development, as well as outreach to K-12 teachers and museums.