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.

娱乐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重要组成部分，在这些方面，它通过增加个人之间的影响和作为创造性思维中的一种教育形式来加强社会关系。尽管从社会学，人类学和心理学中有大量有关此类活动的知识积累，但作为一流的概念，尚未通过计算的镜头来研究一流的概念。当今天的代理商与人类互动时，他们在结构化环境的背景下这样做，并且高度依赖于定义明确的目标和/或行为。将其与假装游戏的领域形成鲜明对比，这涉及在不断改变的共同虚构的第二个现实中非目标的对等活动。假装游戏是一种常见的参与形式，它与自闭症谱系障碍儿童的一系列社会领域有关，例如老年人护理，同伴学习或社交技能疗法。 PI在这项研究中的目标是使机器人系统具有游戏的程序和声明性表征，以便他们能够与同龄人这样的人参加此类活动。该作品旨在发现如何在非结构化环境中与人类参与，即兴创造和与人类创造的能力开发类人形机器人。这种机器人能力将促进人们对与其他人一起玩的经历类似的终身认知，社会认可和陪伴的看法。这些代理人将鼓励人们充满活力的行为和创造力。他们将引起高水平的兴趣，内在的动机和积极的影响，这反过来又会导致人类参与者的更加集中，学习和个人投资。为了实现这些目标，PI将利用他先前在创造力和认知方面的工作来进行一项研究，研究成年人从事基于对象的假装游戏，以在Dyads中对其进行正式理解。根据团队以人为中心的AI和人类机器人互动的专业知识，这些发现将随后应用于建造社会机器人。将评估由此产生的机器人体系结构，以了解如何增强机器人影响和社会接受。更广泛的影响：这项研究将在社会机器人技术领域创造一个新的学术研究方向，这有可能为该领域做出稳固而独特的进步，并改变我们与智能代理商的互动方式，从而增加代理商的社会价值和周围人的接受。这项工作将通过实证研究增加我们对人类参与的理解，尤其是假装情景所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为人类机器人互动社区提供有关如何在HRI环境中使用此类活动以增加影响的。这项工作还具有改善与社会代理人互动的人的学习和创造力，使计算成为教育的宝贵研究方向。该项目将为研究生和本科生的跨学科培训提供肥沃的基础，以及将与科学界共享的大量互动数据。