Avant-Satie! Using ERIK to encode task-relevant expressivity into the animation of autonomous social robots
This work addresses the challenge of improving human-robot interaction for social robotics applications, but it appears incremental as it builds on prior validation of the ERIK method.
The researchers tackled the problem of enabling autonomous social robots to influence user behavior through non-verbal expressive cues, and found that their ERIK technique successfully directed users' action choices during a task.
ERIK is an expressive inverse kinematics technique that has been previously presented and evaluated both algorithmically and in a limited user-interaction scenario. It allows autonomous social robots to convey posture-based expressive information while gaze-tracking users. We have developed a new scenario aimed at further validating some of the unsupported claims from the previous scenario. Our experiment features a fully autonomous Adelino robot, and concludes that ERIK can be used to direct a user's choice of actions during execution of a given task, fully through its non-verbal expressive queues.