2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2018
The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial... more The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial swarms for applications in unknown and dynamic environments. In this context, swarms of robot will need to interact with users to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, little is known about the users' perception of group behavior and dynamics, as well as what is the best interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm as a group to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based solely on the motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to understand how natural, readable, or easily understandable such movement may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behaviour of the swarm. A user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system.
This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. D... more This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. Dance notation systems are developed in the choreographic field as a method to describe and record human movements. Translating movements into symbols is of particular concern for computer science and robotics, which are interested in generating anthropomorphic motions in robots or animated avatars. We examine different research projects on the use of Laban notation for this purpose, and present our own attempt at generating dance movements in a humanoid robot from a Laban score. We discuss the interests and difficulties related to the use of a dance notation system in a robotic context.
Among robots, non-anthropomorphic robotic artifacts are in an interesting position: the fact that... more Among robots, non-anthropomorphic robotic artifacts are in an interesting position: the fact that they do not resemble living beings, yet impart a sense of agency through the way they move, motivates to consider motion as a source of expressivity in itself, independently of any morphological cues. This problematic is considered in parallel to the question of movement notation and the different levels of abstraction that one may consider when reflecting on movement and its relation to a spatial, temporal and social context. This is through a twofold perspective, drawing on both dance notation and cognitive psychology, that we consider the question of movement notation, and its relation to expressive gestures and psychological attributes. To progress in the direction of a system of notation that could integrate the qualitative, relational, and behavioral aspects of movement, we propose different typologies and a model of constraints to analyze, conceive and implement behaviors in robotic artifacts.
Visual working memory performance often declines when objects are tested in new positions from th... more Visual working memory performance often declines when objects are tested in new positions from those they were observed. We report an asymmetry in repositioning costs for orientation compared to colour memory (Experiment 1). Follow-up experiments demonstrated a similar asymmetry for line length memory compared to shape memory (Experiment 2). When different shades of the same colour category were used, however,
To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different s... more To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different sources of information can be exploited: memory of its last visible position, its inferred movement through time, and general understanding of the causal structure of the scene. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. In our experiment, participants predicted the position of an object that disappeared behind an occluder and estimated the degree to which the movement was caused by another object. They made considerable errors in predicting imagined displacements. Moreover, their predictions were misaligned with their judgments of causality. They predicted the positions of the invisible moving objects better in events that they judged less causally correct than in events that they judged more causally correct. These results suggest that physical and cognitive parameters of imagined dynamic events do not merge into unitary mental models ...
Abstract To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of moving objects disappearing from sight, differ... more Abstract To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of moving objects disappearing from sight, different sources of information can be exploited. Among them, the memory of its last visible position and movement, its inferred movement through time, and the general understanding of the causal relations between objects in the scene are particularly important. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. To investigate the mental representation of imagined movements and their relation with our ...
Résumé Dans cette thèse nous étudions la possibilité de l'existence d'un mécanisme de sim... more Résumé Dans cette thèse nous étudions la possibilité de l'existence d'un mécanisme de simulation mentale des trajectoires dans l'espace. Dans le cadre de l'imagination de situations dynamiques, un postulat d'équivalence entre perception et imagination conduit ...
To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object which disappears from sight, it is poss... more To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object which disappears from sight, it is possible to exploit two different sources of information. One source is the memory of the last visible movement of the object, and the other is its inferred movement through time. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into dynamical analog mental representations. To investigate the nature of the mental representation of imagined movements, we used a new experimental paradigm for which a causality attribution task ...
2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
The control of multiple robots in the context of tele-exploration tasks is often attentionally ta... more The control of multiple robots in the context of tele-exploration tasks is often attentionally taxing, resulting in a loss of situational awareness for operators. Unmanned aerial vehicle swarms require significantly more multitasking than controlling a plane, thus making it necessary to devise intuitive feedback sources and control methods for these robots. The purpose of this article is to examine a swarm's nonverbal behaviour as a possible way to increase situational awareness and reduce the operators cognitive load by soliciting intuitions about the swarm's behaviour. To progress on the definition of a database of nonverbal expressions for robot swarms, we first define categories of communicative intents based on spontaneous descriptions of common swarm behaviours. The obtained typology confirms that the first two levels (as defined by Endsley: elements of environment and comprehension of the situation) can be shared through swarms motion-based communication. We then investigate group motion parameters potentially connected to these communicative intents. Results are that synchronized movement and tendency to form figures help convey meaningful information to the operator. We then discuss how this can be applied to realistic scenarios for the intuitive command of remote robotic teams.
Samuel Bianchini, Rémy Bourganel, Emanuele Quinz, Florent Levillain, Elisabetta Zibetti in Empowe... more Samuel Bianchini, Rémy Bourganel, Emanuele Quinz, Florent Levillain, Elisabetta Zibetti in Empowering Users through Design Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services Editor: David Bihanic Springer 2015 While the movement toward granting ever more power to users is very real, can we understand it not from the viewpoint of humans, but that of the objects? How can we design the empowerment of both users and objects, but starting from the objects? Could the object then change its status and become a subject, or at least an agent? With that as our starting position, we pose the hypothesis, theoretical and practical, that in order to engage with such prospects, the objects in question must be endowed with behaviors. And rather than resorting to types of expression related to the morphology or dressing of the objects, we want to focus on the expressive capacity of movement, on the objects’ power to act as embodied fundamentally by movement, by actions that give shape to what would then be possible to describe as “behaviors”. Our approach is first and foremost a matter of art and design, while entertaining a dialogue between two other disciplines: robotics, to put into practice our reflection, and cognitive science, to better understand and prepare this new form of interaction “object-human” that we are seeking. More specifically we are looking to develop objects that misbehave, as a way for these objects to go against the function they have been designed for, and thus develop a certain subjectivity that could enable an affective relationship that is valid for itself. From a state of knowledge in art and design, and from an analysis of behaviour from the point of view of action perception, we propose a design space based on the behaviours produced and the interpretations they elicit in terms of mental states. This conceptual apparatus is put into practice through workshops during which we propose a form of collective experimentation, with the help of our modular robotics toolkit MisB KIT, open-source and accessible both to non-programmer practitioners and to developers. Following a first series of workshops, in particular the one held at TEI 2014 conference, along with the Tangible Media group from the MIT Medialab, we draw some conclusions and discuss some new perspectives regarding the development of (mis)behavioral objects. This publication is part of a research program (“The Behavior of Things”) that is supported, through the Labex Arts-H2H, by Investissements d’Avenir (ANR-10-LABX-80-01) of the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR).
2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2018
The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial... more The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial swarms for applications in unknown and dynamic environments. In this context, swarms of robot will need to interact with users to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, little is known about the users' perception of group behavior and dynamics, as well as what is the best interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm as a group to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based solely on the motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to understand how natural, readable, or easily understandable such movement may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behaviour of the swarm. A user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system.
This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. D... more This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. Dance notation systems are developed in the choreographic field as a method to describe and record human movements. Translating movements into symbols is of particular concern for computer science and robotics, which are interested in generating anthropomorphic motions in robots or animated avatars. We examine different research projects on the use of Laban notation for this purpose, and present our own attempt at generating dance movements in a humanoid robot from a Laban score. We discuss the interests and difficulties related to the use of a dance notation system in a robotic context.
A new race of artifacts comes equipped with behavioral properties. Those properties transmute the... more A new race of artifacts comes equipped with behavioral properties. Those properties transmute the very nature of the object, granting it a life of its own and a special status that stems from the psychological attributions humans naturally produce when confronted by autonomous movements. This article examines what makes behavioral objects special in terms of the psychological properties they evoke in an observer. We look into the notion of behavior and evaluate to what extent the concept of anthropomorphism is a valid construct when considering the behavior of artificial objects. Based on recent research in cognitive psychology, we propose a framework to conceptualize the way people infer psychological attributes from movement, and the way it applies to behavioral objects.
Art installations involving robotic artifacts provide an opportunity to examine human relationshi... more Art installations involving robotic artifacts provide an opportunity to examine human relationships with robots designed solely for the purpose of sustaining evocative behaviours. In an attempt to determine the behavioural characteristics and personality traits attributed by a human to a robotic artifact, we investigated an audience’s experience of an installation that presented three robotic artifacts moving autonomously in an exhibition space. In order to describe the audience’s experience, we present two studies that revealed the psychological attributions spontaneously produced from observing the robots, and visitors’ physical exploration patterns inside the exhibition. We propose a psychological profile for the artwork, and a tentative organization for the attribution process. Using a cluster analysis performed on visitors’ trajectories inside the installation, we highlight four different exploration and interaction heuristics characterized by patterns of approach or withdrawal, passive observation and exploration.
2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2018
The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial... more The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial swarms for applications in unknown and dynamic environments. In this context, swarms of robot will need to interact with users to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, little is known about the users' perception of group behavior and dynamics, as well as what is the best interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm as a group to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based solely on the motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to understand how natural, readable, or easily understandable such movement may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behaviour of the swarm. A user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system.
This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. D... more This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. Dance notation systems are developed in the choreographic field as a method to describe and record human movements. Translating movements into symbols is of particular concern for computer science and robotics, which are interested in generating anthropomorphic motions in robots or animated avatars. We examine different research projects on the use of Laban notation for this purpose, and present our own attempt at generating dance movements in a humanoid robot from a Laban score. We discuss the interests and difficulties related to the use of a dance notation system in a robotic context.
Among robots, non-anthropomorphic robotic artifacts are in an interesting position: the fact that... more Among robots, non-anthropomorphic robotic artifacts are in an interesting position: the fact that they do not resemble living beings, yet impart a sense of agency through the way they move, motivates to consider motion as a source of expressivity in itself, independently of any morphological cues. This problematic is considered in parallel to the question of movement notation and the different levels of abstraction that one may consider when reflecting on movement and its relation to a spatial, temporal and social context. This is through a twofold perspective, drawing on both dance notation and cognitive psychology, that we consider the question of movement notation, and its relation to expressive gestures and psychological attributes. To progress in the direction of a system of notation that could integrate the qualitative, relational, and behavioral aspects of movement, we propose different typologies and a model of constraints to analyze, conceive and implement behaviors in robotic artifacts.
Visual working memory performance often declines when objects are tested in new positions from th... more Visual working memory performance often declines when objects are tested in new positions from those they were observed. We report an asymmetry in repositioning costs for orientation compared to colour memory (Experiment 1). Follow-up experiments demonstrated a similar asymmetry for line length memory compared to shape memory (Experiment 2). When different shades of the same colour category were used, however,
To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different s... more To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object that disappears from sight, different sources of information can be exploited: memory of its last visible position, its inferred movement through time, and general understanding of the causal structure of the scene. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. In our experiment, participants predicted the position of an object that disappeared behind an occluder and estimated the degree to which the movement was caused by another object. They made considerable errors in predicting imagined displacements. Moreover, their predictions were misaligned with their judgments of causality. They predicted the positions of the invisible moving objects better in events that they judged less causally correct than in events that they judged more causally correct. These results suggest that physical and cognitive parameters of imagined dynamic events do not merge into unitary mental models ...
Abstract To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of moving objects disappearing from sight, differ... more Abstract To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of moving objects disappearing from sight, different sources of information can be exploited. Among them, the memory of its last visible position and movement, its inferred movement through time, and the general understanding of the causal relations between objects in the scene are particularly important. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into unified analog mental representations. To investigate the mental representation of imagined movements and their relation with our ...
Résumé Dans cette thèse nous étudions la possibilité de l'existence d'un mécanisme de sim... more Résumé Dans cette thèse nous étudions la possibilité de l'existence d'un mécanisme de simulation mentale des trajectoires dans l'espace. Dans le cadre de l'imagination de situations dynamiques, un postulat d'équivalence entre perception et imagination conduit ...
To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object which disappears from sight, it is poss... more To mentally extrapolate the trajectory of a moving object which disappears from sight, it is possible to exploit two different sources of information. One source is the memory of the last visible movement of the object, and the other is its inferred movement through time. It is often assumed that these cues are integrated into dynamical analog mental representations. To investigate the nature of the mental representation of imagined movements, we used a new experimental paradigm for which a causality attribution task ...
2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
The control of multiple robots in the context of tele-exploration tasks is often attentionally ta... more The control of multiple robots in the context of tele-exploration tasks is often attentionally taxing, resulting in a loss of situational awareness for operators. Unmanned aerial vehicle swarms require significantly more multitasking than controlling a plane, thus making it necessary to devise intuitive feedback sources and control methods for these robots. The purpose of this article is to examine a swarm's nonverbal behaviour as a possible way to increase situational awareness and reduce the operators cognitive load by soliciting intuitions about the swarm's behaviour. To progress on the definition of a database of nonverbal expressions for robot swarms, we first define categories of communicative intents based on spontaneous descriptions of common swarm behaviours. The obtained typology confirms that the first two levels (as defined by Endsley: elements of environment and comprehension of the situation) can be shared through swarms motion-based communication. We then investigate group motion parameters potentially connected to these communicative intents. Results are that synchronized movement and tendency to form figures help convey meaningful information to the operator. We then discuss how this can be applied to realistic scenarios for the intuitive command of remote robotic teams.
Samuel Bianchini, Rémy Bourganel, Emanuele Quinz, Florent Levillain, Elisabetta Zibetti in Empowe... more Samuel Bianchini, Rémy Bourganel, Emanuele Quinz, Florent Levillain, Elisabetta Zibetti in Empowering Users through Design Interdisciplinary Studies and Combined Approaches for Technological Products and Services Editor: David Bihanic Springer 2015 While the movement toward granting ever more power to users is very real, can we understand it not from the viewpoint of humans, but that of the objects? How can we design the empowerment of both users and objects, but starting from the objects? Could the object then change its status and become a subject, or at least an agent? With that as our starting position, we pose the hypothesis, theoretical and practical, that in order to engage with such prospects, the objects in question must be endowed with behaviors. And rather than resorting to types of expression related to the morphology or dressing of the objects, we want to focus on the expressive capacity of movement, on the objects’ power to act as embodied fundamentally by movement, by actions that give shape to what would then be possible to describe as “behaviors”. Our approach is first and foremost a matter of art and design, while entertaining a dialogue between two other disciplines: robotics, to put into practice our reflection, and cognitive science, to better understand and prepare this new form of interaction “object-human” that we are seeking. More specifically we are looking to develop objects that misbehave, as a way for these objects to go against the function they have been designed for, and thus develop a certain subjectivity that could enable an affective relationship that is valid for itself. From a state of knowledge in art and design, and from an analysis of behaviour from the point of view of action perception, we propose a design space based on the behaviours produced and the interpretations they elicit in terms of mental states. This conceptual apparatus is put into practice through workshops during which we propose a form of collective experimentation, with the help of our modular robotics toolkit MisB KIT, open-source and accessible both to non-programmer practitioners and to developers. Following a first series of workshops, in particular the one held at TEI 2014 conference, along with the Tangible Media group from the MIT Medialab, we draw some conclusions and discuss some new perspectives regarding the development of (mis)behavioral objects. This publication is part of a research program (“The Behavior of Things”) that is supported, through the Labex Arts-H2H, by Investissements d’Avenir (ANR-10-LABX-80-01) of the Agence nationale de la recherche (ANR).
2018 27th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), 2018
The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial... more The robotics community is considering the use of large groups of robots, also known as artificial swarms for applications in unknown and dynamic environments. In this context, swarms of robot will need to interact with users to accomplish their mission. Unfortunately, little is known about the users' perception of group behavior and dynamics, as well as what is the best interaction modality for swarms. In this paper, we focus on the movement of the swarm as a group to convey information to a user: we believe that the interpretation of artificial states based solely on the motion can lead to promising natural interaction modalities. We define the expressivity of a movement as a metric to understand how natural, readable, or easily understandable such movement may appear. We then correlate expressivity with the control parameters for the distributed behaviour of the swarm. A user study confirms the relationship between inter-robot distance, temporal and spatial synchronicity, and the perceived expressivity of the robotic system.
This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. D... more This article raises the issue of collaboration between the field of dance and that of robotics. Dance notation systems are developed in the choreographic field as a method to describe and record human movements. Translating movements into symbols is of particular concern for computer science and robotics, which are interested in generating anthropomorphic motions in robots or animated avatars. We examine different research projects on the use of Laban notation for this purpose, and present our own attempt at generating dance movements in a humanoid robot from a Laban score. We discuss the interests and difficulties related to the use of a dance notation system in a robotic context.
A new race of artifacts comes equipped with behavioral properties. Those properties transmute the... more A new race of artifacts comes equipped with behavioral properties. Those properties transmute the very nature of the object, granting it a life of its own and a special status that stems from the psychological attributions humans naturally produce when confronted by autonomous movements. This article examines what makes behavioral objects special in terms of the psychological properties they evoke in an observer. We look into the notion of behavior and evaluate to what extent the concept of anthropomorphism is a valid construct when considering the behavior of artificial objects. Based on recent research in cognitive psychology, we propose a framework to conceptualize the way people infer psychological attributes from movement, and the way it applies to behavioral objects.
Art installations involving robotic artifacts provide an opportunity to examine human relationshi... more Art installations involving robotic artifacts provide an opportunity to examine human relationships with robots designed solely for the purpose of sustaining evocative behaviours. In an attempt to determine the behavioural characteristics and personality traits attributed by a human to a robotic artifact, we investigated an audience’s experience of an installation that presented three robotic artifacts moving autonomously in an exhibition space. In order to describe the audience’s experience, we present two studies that revealed the psychological attributions spontaneously produced from observing the robots, and visitors’ physical exploration patterns inside the exhibition. We propose a psychological profile for the artwork, and a tentative organization for the attribution process. Using a cluster analysis performed on visitors’ trajectories inside the installation, we highlight four different exploration and interaction heuristics characterized by patterns of approach or withdrawal, passive observation and exploration.
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