The success of the interaction between the robotics community and the users of these services is an aspect of considerable importance in the drafting of the development plan of any technology. This aspect becomes even more relevant when dealing with sensitive services and issues such as those related to interaction with specific subgroups of any population. Over the years, there have been few successes in integrating and proposing technologies related to deafness and sign language. Instead, in this paper, we propose an account of successful interaction between a signatory robot and the Italian deaf community, which occurred during the Smart City Robotics Challenge (SciRoc) 2021 competition \footnote{https://sciroc.org/}. Thanks to the use of a participatory design and the involvement of experts belonging to the deaf community from the early stages of the project, it was possible to create a technology that has achieved significant results in terms of acceptance by the community itself and could lead to significant results in the technology development as well.

An Autonomous Conversational Android that Acquires Human-Item Co-Occurrence in the Real World

Supernumerary robotic limbs can act as intelligent prostheses or augment the motion of healthy people to achieve actions which are not possible with only two natural hands. However, as trimanual control is not typical in everyday activities, it is still unknown how different training could influence its acquisition. We conducted an experimental study to evaluate the impact of different forms of trimanual action on training. Two groups of twelve subjects were each trained in virtual reality for five weeks using either a three independent goals task or one dependent goal task. The success of their training was then evaluated by comparing their task performance and motion characteristics between sessions. The results show that subjects dramatically improved their trimanual task performance as a result of training. However, while they showed improved motion efficiency and reduced workload for tasks with multiple independent goals with practice, no such improvement was observed when they trained with the one coordinated goal task.

Instructive Interaction for Redirection of Customer Attention from Robot to Service

To explore the interaction design of an autonomous social robot stationed in a hotel room, we conducted a Wizard of Oz study. The results also suggest novel forms of the hotel room robot’s interactive services, such as a hotel-life management service and conversation partner service as a role of a listening presence, which draws out and understands with the guests’ talk.

When Would You Trust a Robot? A Study onTrust and Theory of Mind in Human-Robot Interactions

We proposed an interactive response strategy involving a robot avatar in a video conference for reducing the stress of response time management of a person with communication difficulty in a conversation. The reduction in stress of response time management is assessed by situational communication apprehension measure, fear of negative evaluation, and sense of being attending indexes. 


An Interactive Response Strategy Involving a Robot Avatar in a Video Conference System for Reducing the Stress of Response Time Management in Communication

Hiroshi Ishiguro

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