Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematics (MASK)
This work addresses the challenge of creating more captivating and interactive experiences for audiences in entertainment or social robotics, though it is incremental as it extends existing persona-driven dialog agents to physical robots.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing audience engagement with interactive robots by developing the MASK system, which uses an anthropomorphic robot with non-verbal interactions to convey distinct personas, and found that users could recognize intended characters in personality- and film-character-based conditions.
This paper presents the design and development of an innovative interactive robotic system to enhance audience engagement using character-like personas. Built upon the foundations of persona-driven dialog agents, this work extends the agent's application to the physical realm, employing robots to provide a more captivating and interactive experience. The proposed system, named the Masquerading Animated Social Kinematic (MASK), leverages an anthropomorphic robot which interacts with guests using non-verbal interactions, including facial expressions and gestures. A behavior generation system based upon a finite-state machine structure effectively conditions robotic behavior to convey distinct personas. The MASK framework integrates a perception engine, a behavior selection engine, and a comprehensive action library to enable real-time, dynamic interactions with minimal human intervention in behavior design. Throughout the user subject studies, we examined whether the users could recognize the intended character in both personality- and film-character-based persona conditions. We conclude by discussing the role of personas in interactive agents and the factors to consider for creating an engaging user experience.