Maintaining, Monitoring, and Managing User Engagement in Social Robotics for Short-Term Interactions

Alan Lindsay, Andres A. Ramirez-Duque, Mary Ellen Foster, Ron Petrick

Keywords: Social Assistive Robots, Child-Robot Interaction, Short-Term Interaction, Managing Engagement, Monitoring Engagement

TL;DR: A framework that extends a plan-based social robot system in order to support managing real-time user engagement

Abstract: Social robotics has already demonstrated benefits across several areas, including robot-assisted education and healthcare. The use of plan-based approaches, which underpin the human-robot interaction with a planning model, are promising, especially in domains where collecting data in advance is challenging (e.g., medical domains). However, although the careful management of engagement during an interaction is critical for the success of social robots, the subject has not been fully explored in the context of plan-based solutions. In this paper we focus on a plan-based social robot system recently developed for use in a medical setting, and demonstrate how we have extended our robot system to maintain, monitor and manage real-time user engagement. We present an empirical evaluation where we sample the possible interactions that our system supports.

Submission Number: 3