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Nicolas Riesterer, Christian Becker-Asano, Julien Hué, Christian Dornhege and Bernhard Nebel.
The Hybrid Agent MARCO.
In
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction, pp. 80-81.
2014.
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We present MARCO, a hybrid, chess playing agent equipped with a custom-built robotic arm and a virtual agent’s face displaying emotions. MARCO was built to investigate the hypothesis that hybrid agents capable of displaying emotions make playing chess more personal and enjoyable. In addition, we aim to explore means of achieving emotional contagion between man and machine.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Kai Oliver Arras and Bernhard Nebel.
Robotic Tele-presence with DARYL in the Wild.
In
Proceedings of the 2nd International Confernce on Human-Agent Interaction, pp. 91-95.
2014.
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This paper describes the results of a qualitative analysis of questionnaire data collected during a public exhibition of our robotic tele-presence system. In Summer 2013 the mildly humanized robot DARYL could be tried out by the general public during our University’s science fair in the city center. People were given the chance to communicate through the robot with their peers and to perceive the world through the “eyes” and “ears” of the robot by means of a head-mounted display with attached headphones. An operator’s voice was instanta- neously transmitted to the robot’s location and his or her head movements were tracked to enable direct, intuitive control of the robot’s head movements. Twenty-seven people were interviewed in a structured way about their impressions and opinions after having either operated or interacted with the tele-operated robot. A careful analysis of the acquired data reveals a rather positive evaluation of the tele-presence system and interesting opinions about suitable application areas. These findings may guide designers of robotic tele-presence systems, a research area of increasing popularity.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Eduardo Meneses, Nicolas Riesterer, Julien Hué, Christian Dornhege and Bernhard Nebel.
The Hybrid Agent MARCO: A Multimodal Autonomous Robotic Chess Opponent.
In
Proceedings of the 2nd International Confernce on Human-Agent Interaction, pp. 173-176.
2014.
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We present MARCO, a hybrid, chess playing agent equipped with a custom-built robotic arm and a virtual agent’s face displaying emotions. MARCO was built to investigate the hypothesis that hybrid agents capable of displaying emo- tions make playing chess more personal and enjoyable. In addition, we aim to explore means of achieving emotional contagion between man and machine.
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Felix Burkhardt, Christian Becker-Asano, Edmon Begoli, Roddy Cowie, Gerhard Fobe, Patrick Gebhard, Abe Kazemzadeh, Ingmar Steiner and Tim Llewellyn.
Application of EmotionML.
In
5th Intl. Workshop on Emotion, Social Signals, Sentiment & Linked Open Data (ES^3LOD), pp. 1-5.
2014.
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Felix Burkhardt, Christian Becker-Asano, Edmon Begoli, Roddy Cowie, Gerhard Fobe, Patrick Gebhard, Abe Kazemzadeh and Ingmar Steiner.
Application of EmotionML.
In
Elektronische Sprachsignalverarbeitung 2014, pp. 201-208.
2014.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Severin Gustorff, Kai Oliver Arras and Bernhard Nebel.
On the Effect of Operator Modality on Social and Spatial Presence during Teleoperation of a Human-Like Robot.
In
Third Interantional Symposium on New Frontiers in Human-Robot Interaction at AISB50.
2014.
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With an increasing availability of affordable and effective robotic telepresence systems, key questions in the design of such systems arise, in particular when they aim at untrained users. Previous research regarding telepresence systems has focused on the (mobile) robotic platforms themselves or the differences between virtual as compared to physical representations thereof. The design space of the operator interface, i.e., the operator modality, with its potential impact on presence, however, has not been explored systematically.
This paper reports results of an empirical study investigating how two different operator modalities impact the perceived spatial and social presence of operators in dyadic remote multi-modal interaction. The robot Daryl, used as telepresence medium in our study, features three degrees of freedom in its head unit as well as a stereo camera system. This enabled the transmission of a stereo, first-person perspective, which was used by the operator in combination with a head-mounted display whose movements were tracked to drive the robot’s head. Compared to a previously realized console-based operator interface, our results show significantly higher spatial as well as social presence for the head-mounted display modality while no significant difference in task performance was found. We conclude that for robotic telepresence platforms with mobile head units and stereo camera systems it seems advisable to use a head-mounted display as part of the teleoperation interface in order to provide operators with a particularly immersive remote presence experience.
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Oliver Damm, Christian Becker-Asano, Manja Lohse, Frank Hegel and Britta Wrede.
Applications for Emotional Robots.
In
Proc. of the 2014 ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Human-robot interaction, pp. 495-496.
2014.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Felix Ruzzoli, Christoph Hölscher and Bernhard Nebel.
A Multi-Agent System based on Unity 4 for Virtual Perception and Wayfinding.
Transportation Research Procedia 2, pp. 425-455. 2014.
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We developed a multi-agent system that is based on the game engine Unity 4 and allows simulating three-dimensional (3D) way- finding behavior of up to 600 airport passengers at a simulation rate of 60 Hz on an average gaming PC. Virtual 3D perception algorithms are implemented so that the agents dynamically check their respective surroundings for visible signs. Each sign is annotated with the direction of one or more exits and with meta-information such as its readability. Thus, based on findings derived from cognitive science experiments, the agents are modeled to sometimes misinterpret this information. Otherwise, they interpret the sign relative to its location and are then steered into the corresponding direction. This simulation framework was also combined with the head-mounted display “Oculus Rift” to let experiment participants find their way in the Virtual Reality environment.
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A. M. Rosenthal-von der Pütten, N. C. Krämer, Christian Becker-Asano, K. Ogawa, S. Nishio and H. Ishiguro.
The uncanny in the wild. Analysis of unscripted human-android interaction in the field.
Intl. Journal of Social Robotics 6 (1), pp. 67-83. 2014.
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Kim Hartmann, Ronald Böck, Christian Becker-Asano, Jonathan Gratch, Björn Schuller and Klaus R Scherer.
ERM4HCI 2013: The 1st workshop on emotion representation and modelling in human-computer-interaction-systems.
In
Proc. of the 15th ACM on Intl. conf. on multimodal interaction, pp. 607-608.
2013.
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Kiril Kiryazov, Robert Lowe, Christian Becker-Asano and Marco Randazzo.
The Role of Arousal in Two-Resource Problem Tasks for Humanoid Service Robots.
In
Proc. IEEE Intl. Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN'13).
2013.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Dali Sun, Corinna N. Scheel, Brunna Tuschen-Caffier and Bernhard Nebel.
Analyzing for emotional arousal in HMD-based head movements during a virtual emergency.
In
Intl. Workshop on Emotion and Computing in conj. with KI2013.
2013.
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This paper reports on results of a statistical analysis of human players' head-movements. Forty-one participants were asked to cope with an unexpected emergency in a virtual parking lot. Before the virtual reality exposure began, half of the participants watched an emotion-inducing movie clip and the other half an emotionally neutral one. The analysis of the acquired questionnaire data reveals, however, that this emotion induction method seems to have been rather ineffective. Thus, it is not surprising that only very weak between group effects are found when analyzing for differences in head movements around the emergency event. In general, horizontal head movement speed is found to be on average significantly faster during the first fifteen seconds directly after the emergency event as compared to just before and another fifteen seconds later. These findings are in line with previous results of an analysis of the acquired physiological data, further substantiating the conclusions drawn.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Philip Stahl, Marco Ragni, Jean-Claude Martin, Matthieu Courgeon and Bernhard Nebel.
An affective virtual agent providing embodied feedback in the paired associate task: system design and evaluation.
In
Proc. of the 13th. Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA 2013), pp. 406-415.
2013.
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An affective, virtual agent is presented that acts as a teacher in the classical paired associate task. It is explained, why and how the virtual agent framework MARC was combined with the cognitive architecture ACT-R, the affect simulation architecture WASABI, and the voice-synthesis module OpenMARY. The agent's affective feedback capabilities are evaluated through an empirical study, in which participants had to solve association tasks. We expected that (1) the presentation of the task by a (neutral) virtual agent would change a learner's performance and that (2) the additional simulation and expression of emotions would impact a learner's performance as well. Finally, we discuss reasons for the lack of statistically significant differences as well as planned future application scenarios of our affective agent framework.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Severin Gustorff, Kai Oliver Arras, Kohei Ogawa, Shuichi Nishio, Hiroshi Ishiguro and Bernhard Nebel.
Robot embodiment, operator modality, and social interaction in tele-existence: a project outline.
In
Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction, pp. 79-80.
2013.
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This paper outlines our ongoing project, which aims to investigate the effects of robot embodiment and operator modality on an operator’s task efficiency and concomitant level of copresence in remote social interaction. After a brief introduction to related work has been given, five research questions are presented. We discuss how these relate to our choice of the two robotic embodiments “DARYL” and “Geminoid F” and the two operator modalities “console interface” and “head-mounted display”. Finally, we postulate that the usefulness of one operator modality over the other will depend on the type of situation an operator has to deal with. This hypothesis is currently being investigated empirically using DARYL at Freiburg University.
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Nicole C. Krämer, Stefan Kopp, Christian Becker-Asano and Nicole Sommer.
Smile and the world will smile with you-The effects of a virtual agent's smile on users’ evaluation and behavior.
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 71 (3), pp. 335-349. 2013.
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Christian Becker-Asano and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Intercultural Differences in Decoding Facial
Expressions of the Android Robot Geminoid F.
Journal of Artificial Intelligence and Soft Computing Research 1 (3), pp. 215-231. 2012.
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As android robots become increasingly sophisticated
in their technical as well as artistic design, their
non-verbal expressiveness is getting closer to that of real
humans. Accordingly, this paper presents results of two
online surveys designed to evaluate a female android's facial
display of five basic emotions. Being interested in
intercultural differences we prepared both surveys in English,
German, as well as Japanese language, and we not only found
that in general our design of the emotional expressions
"fearful" and "surprised" (...)
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Christian Becker-Asano, Kai Oliver Arras, Bernhard Nebel and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
The Effect of Anthropomorphism on Social Tele-Embodiment.
In
IROS 2012 Workshop on Human-Agent Interaction.
2012.
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This paper outlines our approach to explore the impact of using two different robotic embodiments on an oper- ators ability to convey emotional and conversational nonverbal signals to a distant interlocutor. Although a human’s ability to produce and interpret complex, dynamic facial expressions is seen as an important factor for human-human social interac- tion, it remains controversial in humanoid/android robotics, whether recreating such expressiveness is really worth the technical challenge, or not. In fact, one way to avoid the risk of giving rise to uncanny feelings in human observers is to follow an abstract design for humanoid robots. This question is also relevant in the context of mediated interaction using tele-operation technology, as soon as robotic embodiments are involved. Thus, this paper presents our current project, in which we are comparing the efficiency of transmitting nonverbal signals by means of “Daryl” featuring an abstract, mildly humanized design, against that of “Geminoid F”, which features a highly anthropomorphic design. The ability of both of these robots to convey emotions by means of body movements has been successfully evaluated before, but using this ability to transmit nonverbal signals during remote conversation and comparing the resp. efficiencies has not yet been done.
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Birgit Kleim, Thomas Ehrig, Corinna Scheel, Christian Becker-Asano, Bernhard Nebel and Brunna Tuschen-Caffier.
Bewältigungsverhalten in Notfallsituationen aus klinisch-psychologischer Perspektive.
Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie 41 (3), pp. 166-179. 2012.
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Ziel des vorliegenden Beitrags ist es, eine aktuelle Übersicht zu Annahmen und Befunden zu geben, die Hinweise darauf geben, welche Reaktionen bzw. welches Verhalten für die Bewältigung von Notfällen oder traumatischen Erlebnissen hilfreich bzw. gesundheitsförderlich sind. Ließen sich konkrete Aspekte von Bewältigungsverhalten während traumatischer Situationen identifizieren, die besonders adaptiv in Bezug auf die psychische bzw. psychobiologische Anpassung sind, so könnte dieses Wissen perspektivisch zur Entwicklung von Präventions- und Trainingsmaßnahmen genutzt werden. Der Beitrag beschreibt einleitend Traumareaktionen, psychische Traumafolgestörungen und deren Prävalenzraten und gibt eine knappe Übersicht über Prädiktoren für psychische Störungen in Folge traumatischer Erlebnisse. Im Unterschied zu dem Beitrag von Becker-Nehring, Witschen und Bengel (in diesem Heft) fokussiert unser Beitrag vor allem auf die Posttraumatische Belastungsstörung als Traumafolgestörung und auf Bewältigungsverhalten während einer Notfallsituation. Bewältigungsverhalten während und nach einer traumatischen Situation kann zum Teil auch im Forschungslabor experimentell untersucht werden, indem z. B. Methoden der Virtuellen Realität genutzt werden. Dies ist ein weiterer Fokus des Beitrags.
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Corinna N. Scheel, Birgit Kleim, Julian Schmitz, Christian Becker-Asano, Dali Sun, Bernhard Nebel and Brunna Tuschen-Caffier.
Psychophysiologische Belastungsreaktivität nach einem simulierten Feuer in einer Parkgarage.
Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie 41 (3), pp. 180-189. 2012.
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Theoretischer Hindergrund: Bewältigungsverhalten in Notfallsituationen wird meistens retrospektiv erfasst oder ist aufgrund der Verschiedenheit der Notfallsituationen schlecht vergleichbar. Methoden der Virtuellen Realität (VR) ermöglichen die Erfassung von Verhaltensparametern und psychophysiologischen Belastungsreaktionen während eines belastenden Ereignisses und erlauben zudem das standardisierte Wiederholen für mehrere Personen. Fragestellung: Ziel unserer Studie war es, ein neues Notfallszenario (Feuer in einer Parkgarage) in VR zu entwickeln und zu testen, ob sich anhand dessen substanzielle psychische und physiologische Belastungsreaktionen induzieren lassen. Methode: Mehrfach im Untersuchungsablauf wurden das emotionale Erleben und physiologische Parameter erhoben. Ergebnisse: Das VR Szenario führte bei den teilnehmenden Probanden sowohl zu subjektiven als auch zu physiologischen Veränderungen im Sinne einer Stressinduktion. Das von uns entwickelte Szenario erscheint daher brauchbar, Verhaltensstrategien und Bewältigungsverhalten in Notfallsituationen zu simulieren. Schlussfolgerungen: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der VR-Methode mit Blick auf klinisch-psychologische Implikationen werden diskutiert.
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Stephanie Embgen, Matthias Luber, Christian Becker-Asano, Marco Ragni, Vanessa Evers and Kai Oliver Arras.
Robot-Specific Social Cues in Emotional Body Language.
In
Proc. IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN'12), pp. 1019-1025.
2012.
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Humans use very sophisticated ways of bodily emotion expression combining facial expressions, sound, gestures and full body posture. Like others, we want to apply these aspects of human communication to ease the interaction between robots and users. In doing so we believe there is a need to consider what abstraction of human social communicative behaviors is appropriate for robots. The study reported in this paper is a pilot study to not offer simulated emotion but to offer an abstracted robot version of emotion expressions (...)
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Christian Becker-Asano.
Affective Computing Combined with Android Science.
KI - Künstliche Intelligenz Vol. 25, pp. 245-250. 2011.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Dali Sun, Birgit Kleim, Corinna Scheel, Brunna Tuschen-Caffier and Bernhard Nebel.
Outline of an Empirical Study on the Effects of Emotions on Strategic Behavior in Virtual Emergencies.
In
Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction, pp. 508-517.
2011.
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The applicability of appropriate coping strategies is important in emergencies or traumatic experiences such as car accidents or human violence. In this context, emotion regulation and decision making are relevant. However, research on human reactions to traumatic experiences is very challenging and most existing research uses retrospective assessments of these variables of interest. Thus, we are currently developing and evaluating novel methods to investigate human behavior in cases of emergency. Virtual reality scenarios of emergencies are employed to enable an immersive interactive engagement (e.g., dealing with fire inside a building) based on the modification of Valve’s popular Source 2007 game engine.
This paper presents our ongoing research project, which aims at the empirical investigation of human strategic behavior under the influence of emotions while having to cope with virtual emergencies.
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Christian Becker-Asano and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Inter-cultural differences in the evaluation of an androidś facial display of emotions.
In
Bi-annual meeting of the International Society for Research on Emotion (ISRE).
2011.
(BIB)
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Christian Becker-Asano.
Invited Commentary: On Guiding the Design of an Ill-defined Phenomenon.
International Journal of Synthetic Emotions Vol. 2 (2), pp. 66-67. 2011.
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Brunna Tuschen-Caffier, Birgit Kleim, Christian Becker-Asano, Dali Sun, Bernhard Nebel and Corinna Scheel.
Bewältigungsverhalten in virtuellen Notfallsituationen.
In
7. Workshop Kongress für Psychologie und Psychotherapie.
2011.
(BIB)
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Astrid M. von der Pütten, Nicole C. Krämer, Christian Becker-Asano and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
An Android in the Field.
In
ACM/IEEE Intl. Conf. on Human-Robot Interaction, pp. 283-284.
2011.
(BIB)
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Kiril Kiryazov, Robert Lowe, Alberto Montebeli, Tom Ziemke and Christian Becker-Asano.
From the virtual to the robotic: bringing emoting and appraising agents into reality.
In
FET Conference 2011.
2011.
(BIB)
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Christian Becker-Asano, Dali Sun, Birgit Kleim, Corinna N. Scheel, Brunna Tuschen-Caffier and Bernhard Nebel.
CoVE: Coping in Virtual Emergencies.
In
Workshop on Emotion and Computing - Current Research and Future Impact, p. 1.
2011.
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The applicability of appropriate coping strategies is important in emergencies or traumatic experiences such as car accidents or human violence. However, research on human reactions to traumatic experiences is very challenging and most existing research uses retrospective assessments of these variables of interest. Thus, we are currently developing and evaluating novel methods to investigate human behavior in cases of emergency. Virtual Reality (VR) scenarios of emergencies are employed to enable an immersive interactive engagement (e.g., dealing with fire inside a building) based on the modification of Valve’s popular Source 2007 game engine.
Preliminary results of a first empirical study (cp. Figure 1) suggest that our VR scenario has a similar fear-inducing effect as a short movie clip (Becker- Asano, Sun, Kleim, Scheel, Tuschen-Caffier, and Nebel, 2011), which previously has been evaluated to induce fear. In addition, the neutral VR experiences during the training sessions did never elicit fear in our participants, letting us conclude that the interactively presented emergency itself was indeed the fear eliciting factor in the experimental sessions. In the long run, we aim at a more detailed analysis that includes the personality questionnaire and physiological data, which will be analyzed in correlation with the trajectories of the participants in the VR emergency.
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Christian Becker-Asano and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Evaluating facial displays of emotion for the android robot Geminoid F.
In
IEEE SSCI Workshop on Affective Computational Intelligence, pp. 22-29.
2011.
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Nicole C. Krämer, Stefan Kopp, Nicole Sommer and Christian Becker-Asano.
Smile and the world will smile with you - The effects of a virtual agent's smile on users' evaluation and non-conscious behavioral mimicry.
Intl. Journal of Human-Computer Studies. 2010.
(BIB)
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M. D. Cooney, Christian Becker-Asano, Takayuki Kanda, A. Alissandrakis and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Full-body Gesture Recognition Using Inertial Sensors for Playful Interaction with Small Humanoid Robot.
In
Intl. Conf. on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 2276-2282.
2010.
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Christian Becker-Asano and Ipke Wachsmuth.
Affective computing with primary and secondary emotions in a virtual human.
Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems Vol. 20 (1), pp. 32-49. 2010.
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Christian Becker-Asano and Ipke Wachsmuth.
WASABI as a case study of how misattribution of emotion can be modelled computationally.
In
A Blueprint for Affective Computing: a Sourcebook and Manual, pp. 179-193.
2010.
(BIB)
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Christian Becker-Asano, S. Nishio, K. Ogawa and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Exploring the Uncanny Valley with Geminoid HI-1 in a real-world application.
In
IADIS Intl. Conf. on Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction, pp. 121-128.
2010.
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Christian Becker-Asano, Takayuki Kanda, Carlos Ishi and Hiroshi Ishiguro.
Studying laughter combined with two humanoid robots.
AI & Society Vol. 26 (3), pp. 291-300. 2010.
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