The Cognitive Service Robotics Apartment (CSRA), developed by CoAI JRC member Sven Wachsmuth, along with CoAI JRC members Britta Wrede, Petra Wagner, and Sebastian Wrede and other colleagues as part of the COSY@Home-Lab, is a smart apartment embedded in the CITEC research building at Bielefeld University. Designed like an ordinary 1-bedroom apartment, complete with bathroom and kitchen, the lab is equipped with several smart ambient components and a bi-manual mobile service robot. The lab has motion, pressure, and other sensors and audiovisual recording equipment (as shown in the apartment floorplan) which together deliver synchronized multi-modal data repositories about subjects’ interactions with the apartment and the robot. It provides an excellent environment for studying verbal and non-verbal interactions between humans, robots, and virtual agents, supporting CoAI JRC researchers in the quest to develop AI that can interact and cooperative effectively with humans.
A complete digitized version of the CSRA is currently in development, and will soon be openly accessible for use within the Virtual Research and Training Building.
In a recent study, Wachsmuth and colleagues used the CSRA to investigate what sorts of verbal and non-verbal interactions human subjects find most intuitive when interacting with smart environments and robots.
Subjects were given certain tasks to perform with smart devices (such as changing the lighting level) and were able to spontaneously choose suitable forms of interaction without prompting or guidance from experimenters.
The researchers were able to gather almost eight hours of highly detailed, synchronized multi-modal data about the intuitive interactions of about 60 subjects, creating a valuable corpus of data for future analysis and research.
You can read about several other important recent research findings in the CSRA here.
A full description of the CSRA as a technical system is available here.
The Hesitating Robot – Implementation and First Impressions, Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction – HRI ’18, 2018
Interactive Hesitation Synthesis: Modelling and Evaluation, Multimodal Technologies and Interaction, 2(1), 9, 2018
Continuous Interaction Data Acquisition and Evaluation: A Process Applied within a Smart, Robot Inhabited Apartment, Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction – HRI ’18, 2018