Rethinking Privacy in the Age of Social Robots

In the introduction of this thesis, I contend that robot ethics, as a research field, generally treats privacy as the appropriate distribution of information, and therefore overlooks privacy concerns raised by robots beyond this conceptualization’s purview. I illustrate this contention by evaluating a hypothetical case involving a household...

Getting acquainted: First steps for child-robot relationship formation

In this article we discuss two studies of children getting acquainted with an autonomous socially assistive robot. The success of the first encounter is key for a sustainable long-term supportive relationship. We provide four validated behavior design elements that enable the robot to robustly get acquainted with the child. The first are five...

Affective Body Language of Humanoid Robots: Perception and Effects in Human Robot Interaction

Mood contagion of robot body language in human robot interaction

The aim of our work is to design bodily mood expressions of humanoid robots for interactive settings that can be recognized by users and have (positive) effects on people who interact with the robots. To this end, we develop a parameterized behavior model for humanoid robots to express mood through body language. Different settings of the...

Robot Mood is Contagious: Effects of Robot Body Language in the Imitation Game

Mood contagion is an automatic mechanism that induces a congruent mood state by means of the observation of another person's emotional expression. In this paper, we address the question whether robot mood displayed during an imitation game can (a) be recognized by participants and (b) produce contagion effects. Robot mood was displayed by...