Hi! I'm Meiying Qin, a fourth-year graduate student from the Yale Social Robotics Lab.
Today, I'm going to present an exciting study on Animal Robot Interactions.
We collaborated with the Canine Cognition Center at Yale to study whether domestic dogs would follow "Sit" commands from a social robot.
HRI studies the social interactions between humans and robots.
Practically, it can also help with designing industrial products.
Studying Animal Robot Interactions can help to study the social interactions from an evolutionary approach.
The evolutionary approach is used by comparative psychologists.
They compare behaviors or cognitive functions of interest across different species.
The comparison results can help the researchers to understand how the behaviors or the cognitive functions develop phylogenetically,
and thus help them to understand human better.
Similarly, studying Animal Robot Interactions can help to answer theoretical questions in HRI.
Practically, studying Animal Robot Interactions can also help to design the industrial products to be pet-friendly,
so that the robots at home doesn't scare the dogs.
In this study, we choose to study dogs for two reasons.
First, dogs are one of the most common types of pets at home and working animals.
Second, they excel at understand human social behaviors, even better than non-human primates such as chimpanzees and gorillas.
In the previous study, Lakatos et. al studied whether dogs would follow the pointing gesture given by a PeopleBot.
The dog should choose the bucket being pointed at to get the treat.
They included two conditions: the asocial condition and the social condition.
As the name implied, in the asocial condition, the robot behaved mechanically and in the social condition, the robot behaved in a social manner.
If chosen randomly, the dog would only be able to get the treat 50% of the time.
If they follow the pointing gesture, the performance should be significantly above chance level, which is 50 percent.
Their results showed that although the dogs' performance was significantly better in the social condition than in the asocial condition,
the dogs' performance were at chance level in both conditions.
This indicated that the dogs did not follow the pointing gestures.
In our study, we aimed at understanding would dogs respond to a social robot behaviorally at all, or not?
To explore this, we included two experiments.
In experiment one, we tested whether the dogs responded to a robot calling its name. Like, "Fido!".
In experiment two, we tested whether the dogs would follow the "Sit!" commands given by a robot. Like, "Fido, sit!".
We conducted a between-participant study with two conditions.
In the testing condition, we used a robot.
In the control condition, we used a loudspeaker.
In both conditions, we used pre-recorded audio clips with human voice, rather than text-to-speech module, to make it easier for the dog to interpret.
We included 34 pet dogs with various breed, age, and gender. 17 dogs in each condition.
We have tested 42 dogs in total.
8 dogs were excluded due to dogs failing inclusion criteria, technical problems, and human errors.
This exclusion rate is typical in dog studies.
Here's the procedure.
The study started with a brief introduction between the dog, the dog's guardian and the robot.
The brief introduction is followed by experiment one: the robot calling the dog's name.
Here are a few examples.
Scout
Rex
Asher
Katie
Afterwards, is a ten minutes conversation between the guardian and the robot to ensure the dog have enough time to get used to the novel stimuli: the robot or the loudspeaker.
Following the conversation, was the warm-up session.
The warm-up session is a typical design in dog studies.
It generally serves for three purposes.
First, it is used as an exclusion criteria.
Second, it used to excite the dog.
Third, it's used to train the guardians as the handlers in the experiment.
In our study, we included two tasks.
First, the robot providing treats to the dog.
This serves for all three purposes.
Second, the guardians gave the "Sit!" commands.
This is mainly used as an exclusion criteria to ensure the dogs understand the verbal command "Sit!".
In the testing condition, the robot drop the treat on the white plate and give the release command so that the dog can approach the treat.
In the control condition, a human experimenter would put the treat on the white plate.
The dogs were only able to get the treat after the loudspeaker give the release command.
In the end, we run experiment two: the robot giving the "Sit!" commands
and here are a few examples.
Renn, Sit!
[Dog Barks!]
Cooper, Sit!
Penny, Sit!
Bo, Sit!
Chauncey, Sit!
I would like to point out a major difference between the two conditions.
In the testing condition, we provided a treat after the dog followed the "Sit!" commands given by a robot, but not in the loudspeaker's condition.
We acknowledge that this is a limitation of the study and here is why we made the design.
First, when providing a treat, the experimenter should not be in the loop.
Otherwise, the dog may interpret the treat being controlled by the experimenter and thus follow the "Sit!" commands due to human authority.
Second, in Resner's study even trained dogs did not follow the commands given by a loudspeaker at a professional dog training facility with professional dog trainers.
In our study, our dogs are pet dogs and we are not professional dog trainers.
Therefore, we do not expect our dogs to outperform the dogs in Resner's study.
Third, we have attempted other methods as well, such as including an automatic dispenser.
However, it takes too long for the dog to associate the verbal commands with the dispenser.
To ensure an ethical study, our testing protocol requires us to stop testing whenever the dog shows reluctance to continue.
Therefore, we came up with the current design to be used as a baseline condition.
Here are the results for experiment one.
We have 34 dogs in total, 17 in each condition.
The yellow bar showed the number of dogs looking at the target before their names were called.
The blue bar showed the number of dogs looking at the target after their names were called.
In the robot condition, there is significantly more dogs looking at the robot after the names were being called.
In the loudspeaker condition, there is no such trend.
In experiment two (where) the robot giving "Sit!" commands, we used the obedience scores to evaluate the dogs' performances.
The obedience score is the number of the dog sit over the total number of the "Sit!" commands given.
For example, if the dogs were given four "Sit!" commands,
and they sit two times,
then the obedience score is 0.5.
So the obedience score is a number between 0 and 1.
The higher it is, the more often that the dog followed the "Sit!" commands.
Here are the results of experiment two.
Again, there are 34 participants, 17 in each condition.
In the robot condition, the average obedience score is 65 percent,
Indicating the dogs followed the robot commands 65 percent of the time.
In the loudspeaker condition, the dogs only followed the commands 13 percent of the time,
and there are significant difference between the two conditions.
Our result shows that the dogs followed the social commands given by the robot.
We think there are three potential reasons.
First, the dog may perceive the robot as an agent and thus followed its commands.
Second, it may be because of embodiment.
The robot is physically in the room while the agent giving the command via the loudspeaker is not in the room.
Third, it may be because of the multi-modal cues.
The robot provided both the visual and the audio cues while the loudspeaker only provided the audio cues.
In the end, I would like to thank all of our collaborators to help us run the study and code the videos.
I would also like to thank all of our dog participants and their guardians for their support.
I would also like to thank our funding agencies, National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.
If you have any questions regarding this study, please feel free to email me.
For more studies, please visit my website at www.meiyingqin.com or just simply scan the QR code to reach my website.
Thanks for joining me.