Hello, my name is Yaxin Hu, I'm a graduate student at University of Wisconsin - Madison.
Today I will be presenting our research Exploring the Role of Social Robot Behaviors in a Creative
Activity.
My collaborators are Lingjie Feng, Bilge Mutlu and Henny Admoni
Our motivation for this work is the nature of human creativity.
As suggested by the Investment theory of creativity, it is decided by both internal factors and
external ones.
The internal factors are motivation, personality, thinking style, knowledge, and intellectual
process.
While the external ones come from the environment.
What motivated us is the environmental factors of creativity.
In the design process, people have utilized many environmental stimuli to sparkle creative
thinking.
For example, in making collages designers visualize their thinking process or get inspirations
for colors, shapes and composition Besides those traditional creative tools, we want
to introduce a new type of environmental factor for creativity, social robots.
Social robots are active agents in the design process.
They contribute to the task, communicate their creative intentions with the human counterparts,
and affect people's decision-making.
Thought studying social robots for creativity is not new, prior work showed that social robots
contributed to creative expressions in Zen rock gardens making , children’s idea generation,
and figural creativity.
However, there is a gap in literature on adults' creativity with the robot's physically embodied
interaction.
Therefore, we asked these two research questions to study creativity with the robot's embodied participation:
How do robots’ social behaviors affect human idea generation in creative tasks? and How
do people perceive and collaborate with social robots in creative tasks?
To investigate these questions, we designed a platform for people's idea generation with
tangram construction.
A human and a robot take turns doing the task and the robot interacts with people in a social
way.
In our interactive system, we used the Kuri robot, a commercial product of Mayfield Robotics.
We program the robot behaviors and its movements for both task execution and social interactions.
The task was conducted on a digital canvas, which was projected on the floor.
The robot manipulated the canvas by driving around.
People used a computer mouse to operate on the canvas.
They can stop the robot, undo their or the robot's last placement by clicking buttons
on the canvas.
People can also reset the canvas if they want to start over.
They construct the tangrams by dragging, rotating, and scaling the elements.
Finally, they can save the composition for each round once they are satisfied with the
outcome.
The robot would display social behaviors in three scenarios.
Firstly, they would respond to people's operation on the canvas.
Second, the robot would express social behaviors when it finishes a placement.
Lastly, the robot would track the user's placement and make eye contacts to show attention to
the human.
we conducted a formative study to validate and refine the social robot behaviors.
We had 98 approved participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk.
In the online study, we evaluated the positivity, intensity of robot emotions and its human-likeness.
For those behaviors that show the robot's attention to the human, we evaluated the robot's
attentiveness, interactivity and human-likeness.
We had a preliminary evaluation of our system with 12 participants.
The session was set up in the Human and Robot Partners Lab at Carnegie Mellon University.
There were two conditions in the between-subject study.
In the social condition, the robot displays expressive behaviors and interacts with people
in a social way.
In the non-social condition, the robot closes its eyes all the time.
During the session, the participant first watched a video that introduces the task,
the study process, and how to use this interactive system such as buttons on the interface and
the computer mouse.
Then they had a trial session before starting officially.
In the task, they created tangram compositions under the concept "motion".
There was no time limit for this creation task and participants were required to come
up with 15 compositions in total.
After the creation, participants moved on to the categorization task.
In this task, they were first asked to group their 15 compositions by the similarities
of underlying ideas.
They provided names for each category and were allowed to generate as many categories
as they wished.
Finally, participants had a semi-structured interview with the experimenter and finished
a post-experiment questionnaire.
We measured three main factors in the evaluation.
The first one is idea generation outcomes, which reflect the creativity level of the
tangram constructions.
We also measured people's acceptance of robot inputs on canvas and perceptions of the robot
to study human collaborative behaviors.
Next, I will first present our qualitative results, followed by our limited quantitative
results
We summarized five major themes in our qualitative findings.
First, people in both conditions expressed different acceptance levels of robot inputs.
They would reject the robot by ignoring its inputs, accept the robot's input, sometimes
even complemented for the robot's plan and wanted the robot to decide for them.
Also, people have mixed opinions on the robot's contribution to the task.
They commented positively using words such as "helpful", "inspiring", but also thought
the robot was "distracting" and "interfering" sometimes.
People also attributed genders to the robot or viewed it as peer.
Some participants in the social condition attributed personality to the robot.
For instance, one of them described the robot as being "shy".
Additionally, people viewed the robot as having its own idea or plans, sometimes they describe
the plan as "Strong", "dominate".
Sometimes they were confused about the robot's plan saying that "it's complicated to know".
We also observed that participants tended to explore various means of communication
with the robot in the social condition.
Some people showed interest in verbal communication, one participant deliberately removed the robot's
placement in order to "make the robot angry", and one participant used the computer mouse
cursor to pet the robot remotely.
Our quantitative results didn't reveal significant findings for all our hypotheses.
Though participants in the social condition tended to accept the robot's inputs more indicated by
their removal of the robot's placements.
With our preliminary results, we summarized four human behavioral traits in the collaboration
that could indirectly contribute to or diminish people’s creative thinking.
First, participants mentioned that they were inspired by the robot and developed ideas
out of its inputs.
This demonstrates a circular process where the ideas of the participant and the robot
build on each other. This circulation was viewed as an essential feature of creativity.
Second, some participants attributed a dominant role to the robot in the creation.
This can potentially diminish people's creative thinking,
as it can lead to their free ride on the task and losing track of the goal.
Also, the desire for mutual understanding between the human and the robot was observed
in both conditions.
As communicating intents is the key for collaboration and the failure in communication might diminish
the motivation of being creative in the task.
Lastly, we observed some participants came up with playful ways to interact with the
robot.
Prior research showed that being playful could augment the creative process.
Therefore, more playful interactions with the robot could potentially enhance creativity.
We acknowledged some limitations in our research.
The first one is the small sample size.
For our future work, we would increase the population for a more conclusive quantitative
result.
Also, future work could compare humans and robots as creative collaborators.
Finally, with our observed human behavior traits related to creativity, future work
could study social robots' effects on each of them individually.
That's all my presentation.
Thank you for your time.
If you have any questions or thoughts on our work, please share with us with the email
address here.