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Rhythm patterns interaction--synchronization behavior for human-robot joint action.

ABSTRACT: Interactive behavior among humans is governed by the dynamics of movement synchronization in a variety of repetitive tasks. This requires the interaction partners to perform for example rhythmic limb swinging or even goal-directed arm movements. Inspired by that essential feature of human interaction, we present a novel concept and design methodology to synthesize goal-directed synchronization behavior for robotic agents in repetitive joint action tasks. The agents' tasks are described by closed movement trajectories and interpreted as limit cycles, for which instantaneous phase variables are derived based on oscillator theory. Events segmenting the trajectories into multiple primitives are introduced as anchoring points for enhanced synchronization modes. Utilizing both continuous phases and discrete events in a unifying view, we design a continuous dynamical process synchronizing the derived modes. Inverse to the derivation of phases, we also address the generation of goal-directed movements from the behavioral dynamics. The developed concept is implemented to an anthropomorphic robot. For evaluation of the concept an experiment is designed and conducted in which the robot performs a prototypical pick-and-place task jointly with human partners. The effectiveness of the designed behavior is successfully evidenced by objective measures of phase and event synchronization. Feedback gathered from the participants of our exploratory study suggests a subjectively pleasant sense of interaction created by the interactive behavior. The results highlight potential applications of the synchronization concept both in motor coordination among robotic agents and in enhanced social interaction between humanoid agents and humans.

SUBMITTER: Mortl A

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3994045 | biostudies-literature |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:To elucidate the working mechanism behind anthropomorphism, this study investigated whether human participants would anthropomorphize a robot more if they move synchronously versus non-synchronously with it, and whether this is affected by which of the two initiates the movements. We tested two competing hypotheses. The feature-overlap hypothesis predicts that moving in synchrony would increase perceived self-other feature overlap, which in turn might spread activation to codes of features related to humans-which should increase anthropomorphization. In contrast, the autonomy hypothesis predicts that unpredictability increases anthropomorphization, and thus that whenever the robot initiates movements, or when the human initiates movements to which the robot moves non-synchronously, there is an increased perception of the robot as a more human-like, intentionally acting creature, which in turn should increase anthropomorphization. We performed a study with synchrony as within-subjects factor, and initiator (robot or human) as between-subjects factor. To study the impact of synchrony on self-other overlap and perception of human likeness, participants completed two tasks that served as implicit measures of state anthropomorphization, and two questionnaires that served as explicit measures of state anthropomorphization toward the robot. The two implicit measures were the joint Simon task and one-shot Dictator Game. Additionally, participants filled in a trait anthropomorphization questionnaire, to enable correction for baseline tendencies to anthropomorphize. The synchrony manipulation did not affect the joint Simon effect, although there was an effect on average reaction time (RT), where in the group in which the robot initiated the movement, RTs were slower when the human and robot moved non-synchronously. The Dictator Game offer and the state anthropomorphization questionnaires were not affected by the synchrony manipulation. There was, however, a positive correlation between current anthropomorphization of the robot and amount of money offered to it. Given that most measures were not systematically affected by our manipulation, it appears that either our design was suboptimal, or that synchronization does not affect the anthropomorphization of a robot.

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Rhythm patterns interaction--synchronization behavior for human-robot joint action.

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