Browsing by Author "Barnes, Jaclyn"

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    Child-Robot Theater: STEAM Education in an Afterschool Program
    Barnes, Jaclyn; FakhrHosseini, S. Maryam; Vasey, Eric; Duford, Zackery; Ryan, Joseph; Jeon, Myounghoon (ACM, 2017)
    Children in an elementary school afterschool program utilizing the STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts, and math) education paradigm created and acted in short plays with a variety of social robots.
  • The Effects of Robot Voices and Appearances on Users’ Emotion Recognition and Subjective Perception
    Ko, Sangjin; Barnes, Jaclyn; Dong, Jiayuan; Park, Chunghyuk; Howard, Ayanna; Jeon, Myounghoon (World Scientific, 2023-02-22)
    As the influence of social robots in people's daily lives grows, research on understanding people's perception of robots including sociability, trust, acceptance, and preference becomes more pervasive. Research has considered visual, vocal, or tactile cues to express robots' emotions, whereas little research has provided a holistic view in examining the interactions among different factors influencing emotion perception. We investigated multiple facets of user perception on robots during a conversational task by varying the robots' voice types, appearances, and emotions. In our experiment, 20 participants interacted with two robots having four different voice types. While participants were reading fairy tales to the robot, the robot gave vocal feedback with seven emotions and the participants evaluated the robot's profiles through post surveys. The results indicate that (1) the accuracy of emotion perception differed depending on presented emotions, (2) a regular human voice showed higher user preferences and naturalness, (3) but a characterized voice was more appropriate for expressing emotions with significantly higher accuracy in emotion perception, and (4) participants showed significantly higher emotion recognition accuracy with the animal robot than the humanoid robot. A follow-up study (N=10) with voice-only conditions confirmed that the importance of embodiment. The results from this study could provide the guidelines needed to design social robots that consider emotional aspects in conversations between robots and users.
  • The Influence of Robot Design on Acceptance of Social Robots
    Barnes, Jaclyn; FakhrHosseini, Maryam; Jeon, Myounghoon; Park, Chung-Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna (IEEE, 2017-01-01)
    Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a rapidly growing area of research and the important factors of the relationship between robots and the people who use them are still being determined. In the present research, we tried to ascertain if robot appearance influenced people's preference for, interest in, and communication with particular robots. To this aim, 18 college students were asked to interact with 5 different robots, answer an investigator-designed questionnaire, and complete an adapted PHIT-40 scale for each robot. Results suggest that regardless of the actual interaction with robots, participants seem to prefer robots that resemble animals or humans over those that are intended to represent an imaginary creature or do not resemble a creature at all. Results are discussed based on social-robot application and design features.
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    Informal STEAM Education Case Study: Child-Robot Musical Theater
    Barnes, Jaclyn; FakhrHosseini, S. Maryam; Vasey, Eric; Park, Chung Hyuk; Jeon, Myounghoon (ACM, 2019)
    STEAM education fuses arts with traditional STEM fields so that the diverse disciplines can broaden and inform each other. Our eight-week STEAM afterschool program exposed elementary school children to social robotics and musical theater. Approximately 25 children grades K-5 participated over the course of the program with an average of 12 children attending each week. The program covered acting, dancing, music, and drawing with the robots in two-week modules based around the fairy tale, “Beauty and the Beast”. The modular design enabled children who could come to only a few sessions to participate actively. The children demonstrated enthusiasm for both the robots and the musical theater activities and were engaged in the program. Efforts such as this can provide meaningful opportunities for children to explore a variety of arts and STEM fields in an enjoyable manner. The program components and lessons learned are discussed with recommendations for future research.
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    Love at First Sight: Mere Exposure to Robot Appearance Leaves Impressions Similar to Interactions with Physical Robots
    Hosseini, S. Maryam Fakhr; Hilliger, Samantha; Barnes, Jaclyn; Jeon, Myounghoon; Park, Chung Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna M. (IEEE, 2017-01-01)
    As the technology needed to make robots robust and affordable draws ever nearer, human-robot interaction (HRI) research to make robots more useful and accessible to the general population becomes more crucial. In this study, 59 college students filled out an online survey soliciting their judgments regarding seven social robots based solely on appearance. Results suggest that participants prefer robots that resemble animals or humans over those that are intended to represent an imaginary creature or do not resemble a creature at all. Results are discussed based on social robot application and design features.
  • Making Live Theatre with Multiple Robots as Actors Bringing Robots to Rural Schools to Promote STEAM Education for Underserved Students
    Jeon, Myounghoon; FakhrHosseini, Maryram; Barnes, Jaclyn; Duford, Zackery; Zhang, Ruimin; Ryan, Joseph; Vasey, Eric (ACM, 2016)
    We have tried to promote STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) education for underserved students using interactive robots. As an advanced attempt to integrate art and design into STEM education (i.e., STEAM), in the present paper we introduce our afterschool program in which elementary students create live theatre using multiple robots as actors. We hope to receive feedback and comments on our afterschool curriculum and case study, and thus, we can run better sessions at schools and make a standardized protocol regarding this robot actors approach.
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    Musical Robots For Children With ASD Using A Client-Server Architecture
    Zhang, Ruimin; Barnes, Jaclyn; Ryan, Joseph; Jeon, Myounghoon; Park, Chung Hyuk; Howard, Ayanna M. (The International Community for Auditory Display, 2016-07)
    People with Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) are known to have difficulty recognizing and expressing emotions, which affects their social integration. Leveraging the recent advances in interactive robot and music therapy approaches, and integrating both, we have designed musical robots that can facilitate social and emotional interactions of children with ASD. Robots communicate with children with ASD while detecting their emotional states and physical activities and then, make real-time sonification based on the interaction data. Given that we envision the use of multiple robots with children, we have adopted a client-server architecture. Each robot and sensing device plays a role as a terminal, while the sonification server processes all the data and generates harmonized sonification. After describing our goals for the use of sonification, we detail the system architecture and on-going research scenarios. We believe that the present paper offers a new perspective on the sonification application for assistive technologies.