Wisdom and east-west, | Sea in the sky
There are many people studying human-robot interactions. In fact, HRI studies human-computer interaction, and a recent high-profile conference on HRI is being held in New Zealand. HRI research focuses on human interactions with social robots — including home robots, commercial robots, educational robots and toys — and if you now have a robot, it's either a vacuum cleaner or a drone.
We have some understanding of the HRI study of the robot vacuum cleaner, but we know very little about the HRI Institute of Drones, which is why the "Decoding emotions of human-drone interaction" report that appeared at the HRI conference is exciting. In other words, you can program the drone to give it a recognizable personality.
Why do we need a drone that can express emotions? Essentially, emotional expression is the way information is communicated. You can communicate messages like "I'm tired", say goodbye to others and he can understand, you can also express it with movements, such as moving slowly, yawning, and closing your eyes.
The expression of the robot is similar to this. The robot shows on the display how long the battery can last, and it expresses the fact in this way, but this expression is premised: the user needs to stare at the screen and understand the information on the display. If the robot moves slowly and makes a yawning noise, even untrained users can know that the robot is "tired".
For drones, this type of emotional expression is quite practical. Using fatigue to imply insufficient battery is a relatively easy to understand example. And fear: If the drone is about to fly out of control, it can look "scared." If the received command is incomprehensible to the drone, it can look "confused." Again, the drone can directly display the status through the display on the controller, so as to achieve the purpose of communication, if the drone needs your attention at all times, the action can become an effective form of communication.
The Stanford researchers have created an "emotion model space" for drones, which is composed of 8 emotional states (personalities) that define characteristics that make it easier for human users to identify, and these emotions can be expressed through simple actions that drones can accomplish. These personalities include: brave, dull, sleepy, irritable, happy, sad, scared, shy. For example, a drone with a brave personality moves fast and smoothly, and if you let it go backwards, it will choose to turn around and fly straight. Sluggish drones will wobble a bit when flying. Grumpy drones may need to repeat commands to obey, while sad drones will fly close to the ground.
The researchers distilled the personalities of the 8 drones into 4 types: tired drones, anti-social drones, adventure hero drones, and mysterious spy drones. The tired drone flies at a speed of 1.1mph, the response time is delayed by 3 seconds, the flight altitude is low, and the special action is rocking. The Adventure Hero drone flies at a speed of 7.7mph, the response time is instantaneous, the flight altitude is high, and special actions include rotation and flip. The study asked participants to interact with the drone and then have them answer some questions about the experience. In general, users can say what the personality displayed by the drone is (with an average recognition rate of 60%), and the personality recognition rate of adventure heroes reaches 100%. All participants can identify changes in drone behavior.