CMU RI Thesis Proposal: Rhythmic Human-Robot Social Interaction

Marek Michalowski
Robotics Institute
Carnegie Mellon University

Abstract:

Social interaction is a dynamic process of coordinated activity between constantly adapting participants. Social scientists have discovered interactional synchrony (the temporal coordination of rhythmic communicative behaviors between interactors) as an important foundation or scaffold for establishing rapport, engagement, common ground, and emotional contagion between children and caregivers, between conversational partners, between teammates performing joint tasks, and so on. It is our goal to develop the capacity for robots to participate rhythmically in social interactions with people. The proposed thesis aims to:

• create robotic technologies that perceive, represent, and behave according to social rhythms;
• understand the effects of rhythmic synchrony on human-robot social interaction; and
• explore the application of such systems in educational or therapeutic settings.

We believe that interpersonal coordination, and specifically rhythmic interactional synchrony, is necessary for the regulation of natural, comfortable, effective human-robot interaction. The challenge is to create a computational framework for sensing and behaving according to these principles and to demonstrate the importance of doing so correctly. We have selected play as the domain in which to develop and evaluate such a framework. Play-oriented interactions are a particularly appropriate context for this type of work, as the principles under study (rhythm and synchrony) are magnified or emphasized in playful interactions -- physical, repetitive, and exaggerated as they often are. We are developing a system that can perceive rhythms in multiple modalities and synchronize its periodic dance-like movement to these rhythms while under high-level attentional control of a human teleoperator. The modeling, perception, and generation of rhythmic behaviors forms the basis for rhythmic intelligence -- the ability to establish and maintain interpersonal coordination. Rhythmic intelligence includes the ability to achieve specific goals in an interaction through the selection of behaviors and to understand the dynamically changing nature of an interaction such that it is possible to select appropriate roles for different situations.

While we regard dance as a form of play that magnifies the rhythmic qualities of interaction (and is therefore useful for developing the relevant technologies), it is also an potentially important application for such technologies in its own right. We intend to identify movement-based therapeutic interventions that are amenable to implementation using our rhythmically intelligent technology, and create dance activities with robots that implement games and techniques that are currently in use by dance therapists.

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