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Socially Distributed Perception: GRACE plays social tag at AAAI 2005

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An Erratum to this article was published on 14 April 2007

Abstract

This paper presents a robot search task (social tag) that uses social interaction, in the form of asking for help, as an integral component of task completion. Socially distributed perception is defined as a robot's ability to augment its limited sensory capacities through social interaction. We describe the task of social tag and its implementation on the robot GRACE for the AAAI 2005 Mobile Robot Competition & Exhibition. We then discuss our observations and analyses of GRACE's performance as a situated interaction with conference participants. Our results suggest we were successful in promoting a form of social interaction that allowed people to help the robot achieve its goal. Furthermore, we found that different social uses of the physical space had an effect on the nature of the interaction. Finally, we discuss the implications of this design approach for effective and compelling human-robot interaction, considering its relationship to concepts such as dependency, mixed initiative, and socially distributed cognition.

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Notes

  1. We use the term “affordances” to refer to the relational and emergent properties of interaction between an actor (in this case, the robot) and its physical and social environment. The social environment of the conference presents certain latent “action possibilities” to the robot, which are dependent on its capabilities but may exist independently of its recognition of those possibilities.

  2. Noldus Information Technology: The Observer. URL: http://www.noldus.com/products/observer.

  3. Lag-sequential analysis refers to the systematic observation of interaction and behavior sequences. It is used to detect commonly occurring sequences of events and to study the dynamics of interactive behavior from moment to moment. See Bakeman and Gottman (2006) for more information.

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Acknowledgments

This project was partially supported by National Science Foundation projects #IIS-0329014, #IIS-0121426, and #SES-0522630.

Thanks to Greg Armstrong and Brennan Sellner for technical contributions, to Sara Kiesler and Jodi Forlizzi for helpful comments, and to Linnda Caporael for analytical resources.

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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10514-007-9033-z

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Michalowski, M.P., Šabanović, S., DiSalvo, C. et al. Socially Distributed Perception: GRACE plays social tag at AAAI 2005. Auton Robot 22, 385–397 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-006-9015-6

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