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![The Honda Asimo robot (left) and the Softbank Robotics Pepper robot (right), both are examples of humanoid robots aimed at close interaction with people [3].](publication/349674472/figure/fig1/AS:996244801474562@1614534678871/The-Honda-Asimo-robot-left-and-the-Softbank-Robotics-Pepper-robot-right-both-are.jpg)
The Honda Asimo robot (left) and the Softbank Robotics Pepper robot (right), both are examples of humanoid robots aimed at close interaction with people [3].
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We will increasingly become dependent on automation to support our manufacturing and daily living, and robots are likely to take an important place in this. Unfortunately, currently not all the robots are accessible for all users. This is due to the different characteristics of users, as users with visual, hearing, motor or cognitive disabilities w...
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... applications of SARs have been extended to include many domains, such as health care, elderly care, education, household task, work environments and public spaces (see Figure 1). The use of SARs is expected to expand highly in future due to the increment in numbers of elderly people [4]. ...
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... Such studies, tailored to specific user groups, may not address the broader context of diverse user interactions. Furthermore, accessibility research often lacks comparisons with non-disabled users, e.g., [23,24], or does not even include the disabled target user group, e.g., [25]. ...
The rapidly growing research on the accessibility of digital technologies has focused on blind or visually impaired (BVI) users. However, the field of human–robot interaction has largely neglected the needs of BVI users despite the increasing integration of assistive robots into daily life and their potential benefits for our aging societies. One basic robotic capability is object handover. Robots assisting BVI users should be able to coordinate handovers without eye contact. This study gathered insights on the usability of human–robot handovers, including 20 BVI and 20 sighted participants. In a standardized experiment with a mixed design, a handover robot prototype equipped with a voice user interface and haptic feedback was evaluated. The robot handed over everyday objects (i) by placing them on a table and (ii) by allowing for midair grasping. The usability target was met, and all user groups reported a positive user experience. In total, 97.3% of all handovers were successful. The qualitative feedback showed an appreciation for the clear communication of the robot’s actions and the handover reliability. However, the duration of the handover was seen as a critical issue. According to all subjective criteria, the BVI participants showed higher variances compared to the sighted participants. Design recommendations for improving robotic handovers equally supporting both user groups are given.
... Regarding heuristics and guidelines for HRI, Qbilat et al. (2021) proposed accessibility guidelines. In the study by Gualtieri, Rauch, et al. (2020c) prerequisites and design guidelines were classified to aid designers in creating safe, human-centered, and efficient collaborative assembly workplaces. ...
... The issue of inclusivity arises in the domain of robotics, where not all users can access the robots due to their diverse characteristics such as visual, hearing, motor, or cognitive limitations. The neglect of these aspects during the design, implementation or interaction phase creates accessibility barriers, preventing users with disabilities from using the robotic system (Qbilat et al., 2021). v) Multimodality. ...
... These heuristics in the Functionality subcategory are based on the guidelines and research by (Drury et al., 2004;Clarkson and Arkin, 2007;Tsui et al., 2010;Weiss et al., 2010;Young et al., 2011;Keebler et al., 2012;Adamides et al., 2014;Lewis et al., 2014;Wibowo et al., 2017;Gualtieri, Monizza, et al., 2020a;Frijns and Schmidbauer, 2021;Qbilat et al., 2021). The Functionality heuristics are organized into five main subcategories: i) system, ii) information, iii) task, iv) error handling, and v) assistance. ...
Humans and robots will increasingly have to work together in the new industrial context. Therefore, it is necessary to improve the User Experience, Technology Acceptance, and overall wellbeing to achieve a smoother and more satisfying interaction while obtaining the maximum performance possible out of it. For this reason, it is essential to analyze these interactions to enhance User Experience. The heuristic evaluation is an easy-to-use, low-cost method that can be applied at different stages of a design process in an iterative manner. Despite these advantages, there is rarely a list of heuristics in the current literature that evaluates Human-Robot interactions both from a User Experience, Technology Acceptance, and Human-Centered approach. Such an approach should integrate key aspects like safety, trust, and perceived safety, ergonomics and workload, inclusivity, and multimodality, as well as robot characteristics and functionalities. Therefore, a new set of heuristics, namely, the HEUROBOX tool, is presented in this work in the form of the HEUROBOX tool to help practitioners and researchers in the assessment of human-robot systems in industrial environments. The HEUROBOX tool clusters design guidelines and methodologies as a logic list of heuristics for human-robot interaction and comprises four categories: Safety, Ergonomics, Functionality, and Interfaces. They include 84 heuristics in the basic evaluation, while the advanced evaluation lists a total of 228 heuristics in order to adapt the tool to the evaluation of different industrial requirements. Finally, the set of new heuristics has been validated by experts using the System Usability Scale (SUS) questionnaire and the categories has been prioritized in order of their importance in the evaluation of Human-Robot Interaction through the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP).
... However, some studies have reviewed anthropomorphic and caricatured robots. In the literature, one study found that a humanoid robot was perceived as humanlike and elicited stronger expectations about the robot's social and cognitive competencies [70] than a zoomorphic robot, which was perceived as having more the functions of an animal, along with a lower level of functioning. In addition, if the robot is humanoid, it should be considered whether it is a boy/girl or adult. ...
Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have deficits in social interaction and expressing and understanding emotions. Based on this, robots for children with ASD have been proposed. However, few studies have been conducted about how to design a social robot for children with ASD. Non-experimental studies have been carried out to evaluate social robots; however, the general methodology that should be used to design a social robot is not clear. This study proposes a design path for a social robot for emotional communication for children with ASD following a user-centered design approach. This design path was applied to a case study and evaluated by a group of experts in psychology, human–robot interaction, and human–computer interaction from Chile and Colombia, as well as parents of children with ASD. Our results show that following the proposed design path for a social robot to communicate emotions for children with ASD is favorable.
... In this paper, we address the practical problem of training Learnable-MPC policies when the demonstrator and the imitator do not share the same dynamics and their state spaces only have a partial overlap. This problem also has relevance in the development of personalized robotic accessibility tools for differently-abled humans [23]. Our website 2 contains videos showing our learned policies in action. ...
Model predictive control (MPC) is a popular approach for trajectory optimization in practical robotics applications. MPC policies can optimize trajectory parameters under kinodynamic and safety constraints and provide guarantees on safety, optimality, generalizability, interpretability, and explainability. However, some behaviors are complex and it is difficult to hand-craft an MPC objective function. A special class of MPC policies called Learnable-MPC addresses this difficulty using imitation learning from expert demonstrations. However, they require the demonstrator and the imitator agents to be identical which is hard to satisfy in many real world applications of robotics. In this paper, we address the practical problem of training Learnable-MPC policies when the demonstrator and the imitator do not share the same dynamics and their state spaces may have a partial overlap. We propose a novel approach that uses a generative adversarial network (GAN) to minimize the Jensen-Shannon divergence between the state-trajectory distributions of the demonstrator and the imitator. We evaluate our approach on a variety of simulated robotics tasks of DeepMind Control suite and demonstrate the efficacy of our approach at learning the demonstrator's behavior without having to copy their actions.
... However, some studies reviewed have used robot anthropomorphic and caricatured. In the literature found a humanoid robot is perceived as humanlike and elicits strong expectations about the robot's social and cognitive competencies [69] than a zoomorphic robot which is perceived more functions of an animal, and with a lower level of functioning. In addition, if the robot is humanoid, should consider if is a boy/girl or adult. ...
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder have deficits in social interaction and expressing and understanding emotions. Many robots for children with ASD have been proposed. However, few studies were found about how to design a social robot for children with ASD. Studies reviewed employed non-experimental studies to evaluate a social robot, but the methodology to design a social robot is rare. This study proposes a design path for a social robot for emotional communi-cation for children with ASD, following User-Centered Design approach. This design path is ap-plied with a study case, evaluated with an expert group on psychologist, human-robot interaction, human-computer interaction, and parents of children with ASD. Results show than following the design path proposed to design a social robot to communication emotions for children ASD is favorable.
... The five articles showing the tools are fairly recent. The study by Charalambous et al. [61] dates from 2017; Von Der Pütten et al. [57], from 2018; Gualtieri et al. [69], from 2020; and Qbilat et al. [73] and Prati et al. [39] from 2021. ...
... These guidelines could help application designers properly develop and evaluate safe, people-centred, and efficient collaborative assembly workstations. Qbilat et al. [73] proposed HRI accessibility guidelines. These guidelines were evaluated by 17 HRI designers and/or developers. ...
Industry 4.0 has ushered in a new era of process automation, thus redefining the role of people and altering existing workplaces into unknown formats. The number of robots in the manufacturing industry has been steadily increasing for several decades and in recent years the number and variety of industries using robots have also increased. For robots to become allies in the day-to-day lives of operators, they need to provide positive and fit-for-purpose experiences through smooth and satisfying interactions. In this sense, user experience (UX) serves as the greatest link between persons and robots. Essential to the study of UX is its evaluation. Therefore, the aim of this study is to identify methodologies that evaluate the human–robot interaction (HRI) from a human-centred approach. A systematic literature review has been carried out, in which 24 articles have been identified. Among these, are 15 experimental studies, in addition to theoretical frameworks and tools. The review has provided insight into how evaluations are conducted in HRI. The results show the most evaluated factors and how they are measured considering different types of measurements: qualitative and quantitative, objective and subjective. Research gaps and future directions are correspondingly identified.
... Particularly, many methods for treating ADHD using robots are being developed [11]. Representative examples are NAO, Pepper [12], Silbot [13,14], Sanbot Elf [15], and Bioloid humanoid robot [16]. The aforementioned robots help children with ADHD through speech therapy development, motor skills therapy, traditional therapeutic improvement, attention and memory therapy, and so on [11]. ...
Although attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in children is rising worldwide, fewer studies have focused on screening than on the treatment of ADHD. Most previous similar ADHD classification studies classified only ADHD and normal classes. However, medical professionals believe that better distinguishing the ADHD–RISK class will assist them socially and medically. We created a projection-based game in which we can see stimuli and responses to better understand children’s abnormal behavior. The developed screening game is divided into 11 stages. Children play five games. Each game is divided into waiting and game stages; thus, 10 stages are created, and the additional waiting stage includes an explanation stage where the robot waits while explaining the first game. Herein, we classified normal, ADHD–RISK, and ADHD using skeleton data obtained through games for ADHD screening of children and a bidirectional long short-term memory-based deep learning model. We verified the importance of each stage by passing the feature for each stage through the channel attention layer. Consequently, the final classification accuracy of the three classes was 98.15% using bi-directional LSTM with channel attention model. Additionally, the attention scores obtained through the channel attention layer indicated that the data in the latter part of the game are heavily involved in learning the ADHD–RISK case. These results imply that for ADHD–RISK, the game is repeated, and children’s attention decreases as they progress to the second half.
... Mazmela [12] y Aranburu [13] proponen listados de heurísticos basándose en las funciones que cumple el HMI. En el caso de la robótica Qbilat et al. [14] presentan una propuesta de directrices de accesibilidad para la interacción persona-robot (HRI). En el estudio de Gualtieri et al. [15] se desarrolla una recopilación y clasificación de requisitos previos y directrices de diseño. ...
... Actualmente no todos los robots son accesibles para todas las personas usuarias. Esto se debe a las diferentes características de las personas, ya que los usuarios con discapacidades visuales, auditivas, motrices o cognitivas no se han tenido en cuenta durante la fase de diseño, implementación o interacción, lo que provoca barreras de accesibilidad para las personas que tienen limitaciones [14]. ...
En la nueva industria cada vez son más los robots utilizados. Para aprovechar al máximo los beneficios que los robots pueden ofrecer, es necesario generar una interacción fluida y satisfactoria persona-robot, de modo que se refuerce una relación simbiótica entre ambos. Un aspecto clave para el éxito de la Interacción Persona-Robot (HRI) es centrarse en la experiencia de usuario (UX). En este sentido, la evaluación heurística se presenta como una herramienta eficaz, ya que permite identificar problemas de diseño mediante una aplicación sencilla y de bajo coste. El objetivo de este trabajo es desarrollar un nuevo listado de heurísticos para evaluar la HRI en entornos industriales. Se han considerado una serie de dimensiones para constituir el nuevo listado: (i) seguridad, confianza y seguridad percibida, (ii) ergonomía física, (iii) ergonomía cognitiva y emociones, (iv) inclusividad, (v) tipos de interfaces y (vi) tipos de robots y funcionalidades. Para ello, se ha realizado una búsqueda de la literatura y una agrupación de los heurísticos identificados. Finalmente se propone un listado de heurísticos compuesto de los siguientes apartados y que considera en cada una de ellas las dimensiones mencionadas (i) aspectos generales, (ii) funcionalidades y (iii) tipos de interfaces.
... Moreover, Qbilat et al. [49] proposed a set of accessibility guidelines for human-robot interaction by adapting and extending existing accessibility standards and guidelines for other mainstream user interfaces (e.g., web sites, mobile applications). The guidelines were evaluated by seventeen human-robot interaction (HRI) designers from four aspects, including usability, social acceptance, user experience, and social impact. ...
Mobile service robots have become increasingly ubiquitous. However, these robots can pose potential accessibility issues and safety concerns to people with visual impairments (PVI). We sought to explore the challenges faced by PVI around mainstream mobile service robots and identify their needs. Seventeen PVI were interviewed about their experiences with three emerging robots: vacuum robots, delivery robots, and drones. We comprehensively investigated PVI's robot experiences by considering their different roles around robots -- direct users and bystanders. Our study highlighted participants' challenges and concerns about the accessibility, safety, and privacy issues around mobile service robots. We found that the lack of accessible feedback made it difficult for PVI to precisely control, locate, and track the status of the robots. Moreover, encountering mobile robots as bystanders confused and even scared the participants, presenting safety and privacy barriers. We further distilled design considerations for more accessible and safe robots for PVI.
... The opinions of the participants given during the focus groups and in the questionnaires resonate with recently proposed HRI accessibility guidelines by Qbilat et al. [28]. These guidelines were evaluated with HRI designers and/or developers instead of with potential users of the systems and were focused on socially assistive robotics. ...
Existing design standards and guidelines provide guidance on what factors to consider to produce interactive systems that are not only usable, but also accessible. However, these standards are usually general, and when it comes to designing an interactive system for children with Learning Difficulties or Disabilities (LD) and/or Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) they are often not specific enough, leading to systems that are not fit for that purpose. If we dive into the area of educational robotics, we face even more issues, in part due to the relative novelty of these technologies. In this paper, we present an analysis of 26 existing educational robots and the interfaces used to control them. Furthermore, we present the results of running focus groups and a questionnaire with 32 educators with expertise in Special Education and parents at four different institutions, to explore potential accessibility issues of existing systems and to identify desirable characteristics. We conclude introducing an initial set of design recommendations, to complement existing design standards and guidelines, that would help with producing future more accessible control interfaces for educational robots, with an especial focus on helping pupils with LDs and/or ASC.
