Applied Robotics in Gothenburg
Short description
We want to both critically question and explore the idea of robotic support in relation to human needs and everyday practices. The research is characterised by participatory design and design approaches such as co-creation, studies, sketching, critical design and storytelling to understand users and different stakeholders perspectives, needs and desires. Our research results may both critically question or inform robotic solutions or propose other types of solutions.
Applied robotic research as we see it:
Understanding robotic challenges and opportunities based on existing human needs and desires from a holistic perspective
We, a team of researchers, designers and PhD students, want to question technology-driven research and instead seek to understand robotic solutions in relation to human needs and everyday practices. Currently, the kinds of methods and techniques that are prominently used in the research field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) are affecting the kind of research questions and perspectives investigated.
While there is a place and need for robotic-centered research focusing on what is possible with robots, we do think it may be time for the HRI field to explore the possibilities of adopting and developing a variety of new human-centered design and evaluation approaches. By opening up for streams of research focusing on more holistic and critical perspectives of what humans may need or not need from robotic solutions, our goal is to recognize when other solutions (i.e., outside the field of robotics) may be more legitimate.
Based on this vision, our aim is to work closely with citizens and stakeholders who want to engage in questions concerning the technological development. We aim to ground our research in participatory and inclusive design approaches by using storytelling, sketching and other design approaches that allow us to explore, understand and communicate a diversity of human needs, desires and experiences.
We want to reveal both opportunities and threats that people experience with robotic solutions. This is not merely a question about technological innovations, but concerns laws and regulations surrounding for example personal assistance, politics, societal challenges, social sustainable solutions, ethics, as well as aesthetical and social needs.
Our research
Although we are interested in robots in all their forms, we aim to always take into account the following question: what kind of solution do stakeholders need and why? We take humans’ needs as a point of departure and are ready to accept the answer that a robot is not the solution.
One of our projects concerns robotic tutors developed for use in education (www.emote-project.eu), the underlying assumption being that social robots can present an innovative and useful way for students to learn. This project has actively involved stakeholders to contribute to the design of robotic tutors, as is common in a User-Centred Design approach. Teachers and students were for example consulted in order to study what their needs might be for a robotic tutor. One of the findings was that although teachers were curious about trying novel technologies, they also expressed issues of facing time constraints, making robots a potential extra burden if teachers would be required to take responsibility for practical things such as technical issues or establishing fair time distribution for students to work with the robot.
In another project we focused on understanding meals from the perspective of people that need meal assistance. To understand challenges and possibilities with robot support in meals, we used long-term interviews and an experience workshop with people who needed human assistants or made use of an eating aid product called Bestic (www.bestic.se). We learned that any solution (robotic or human) affects the perceived aesthetic qualities and the social qualities of the meal. For example, undesirable social qualities can concern privacy issues with a personal assistant being present in social situations, whereas undesirable social qualities with a robotic solution may concern issues such as spilling or attracting attention. We also found that there is a lack of everday solutions that a more advanced robotic platform may not have the answer to.
Based on the experiences in our previous projects we are now investigating the possibilities to create speculative design project with an organisation for independent living. This concerns how people using personal assistance can be the point of departure in a project, as active shapers of a critical understanding of robotic solutions.
Members:
- Sara Ljungblad
- Sofia Serholt
- Mohammad Obaid
- Pamela Lindgren
- Mafalda Samuelsson Gamboa
- Gordana Dodig Crnkovic
- Ilaria Torres
2023
Ljungblad, S. (2023). Applying” designerly framing” to understand assisted feeding as social aesthetic bodily experiences. ACM Transactions on Human-Robot Interaction.
Gamboa, M., Baytaş, M. A., Hendriks, S., & Ljungblad, S. (2023, February). Wisp: Drones as Companions for Breathing. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 1-16).
Gamboa, M., Ljungblad, S., & Sturdee, M. (2023, February). Conversational Composites: A Method for Illustration Layering. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 1-13).
Gamboa, M. (2023, February). My Body, My Baby, and Everything Else: An Autoethnographic Illustrated Portfolio of Intra-Actions in Pregnancy and Childbirth. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 1-14).
2022
Serholt, S., Ljungblad, S., & Ní Bhroin, N. (2022). Introduction: special issue—critical robotics research. AI & SOCIETY, 37(2), 417-423.
Pareto, L., Ekström, S., & Serholt, S. (2022). Children's learning-by-teaching with a social robot versus a younger child: Comparing interactions and tutoring styles. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 9.
Gamboa, M. (2022, June). Conversations with Myself: Sketching Workshop Experiences in Design Epistemology. In Creativity and Cognition (pp. 71-82).
Obaid, M., Tatar, K., Wiberg, M., Said, A., Rost, M., Weilenmann, A., ... & Eyssel, F. (2022, October). Social Drones for Health and Well-being. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 1-4).
Phaijit, O., Obaid, M., Sammut, C., & Johal, W. (2022, March). A Taxonomy of Functional Augmented Reality for Human-Robot Interaction. In 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 294-303). IEEE.
Paluch, R., Cerna, K., Volkova, G., Seidler, M., Weiler, T., Obaid, M., & Müller, C. (2022). Robots in heterogeneous contexts: Negotiation of co-creative lifelong learning spaces through participatory approaches. In Proceedings of 20th European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work. European Society for Socially Embedded Technologies (EUSSET).
Phaijit, O., Obaid, M., Sammut, C., & Johal, W. (2022, March). A Demonstration of the Taxonomy of Functional Augmented Reality for Human-Robot Interaction. In 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 981-985). IEEE.
Grafström, A., Holmgren, M., Linge, S., Lagerberg, T., & Obaid, M. (2022, October). A Speculative Design Approach to Investigate Interactions for an Assistant Robot Cleaner in Food Plants. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2022 Nordic Human-Computer Interaction Conference (pp. 1-5).
Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Ljungblad, S., & Obaid, M. (2022, April). 4th Space as Smart Information Ecology with Design Requirements of Sustainability, Ethics and Inclusion. In Proceedings (Vol. 81, No. 1, p. 124). MDPI.
2021
Ljungblad, S., Man, Y., Baytaş, M. A., Gamboa, M., Obaid, M., & Fjeld, M. (2021, May). What matters in professional drone pilots’ practice? An interview study to understand the complexity of their work and inform human-drone interaction research. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-16).
Alves-Oliveira, P., Lupetti, M. L., Luria, M., Löffler, D., Gamboa, M., Albaugh, L., ... & Lockton, D. (2021, June). Collection of metaphors for human-robot interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (pp. 1366-1379).
Holstein, T., Dodig-Crnkovic, G., & Pelliccione, P. (2021). Steps Toward Real-World Ethics for Self-Driving Cars: Beyond the Trolley Problem. In Machine Law, Ethics, and Morality in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 85-107). IGI Global.
Gamboa, M., Obaid, M., & Ljungblad, S. (2021, March). Ritual Drones: Designing and Studying Critical Flying Companions. In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 562-564).
Samuelsson-Gamboa, M., Obaid, M., & Ljungblad, S. (2021, February). Mechanical Wisps: Research through Design of Playful Companion Drones. In Graduate School Winter Conference.
Dodig-Crnkovic, G., Holstein, T., & Pelliccione, P. (2021). Future intelligent autonomous robots, ethical by design. Learning from autonomous cars ethics. arXiv preprint arXiv:2107.08122.
Baldursson, B., Björk, T., Johansson, L., Rickardsson, A., Widerstrand, E., Gamboa, M., & Obaid, M. (2021, March). DroRun: Drone Visual Interactions to Mediate a Running Group. In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 148-152).
Alnajjar, F., Bartneck, C., Baxter, P., Belpaeme, T., Cappuccio, M. L., Di Dio, C., ... & Reich-Stiebert, N. (2021). Robots in education: An introduction to high-tech social agents, intelligent tutors, and curricular tools. Routledge.
Cappuccio, M. L., Sandoval, E. B., Mubin, O., Obaid, M., & Velonaki, M. (2021). Robotics Aids for Character Building: More than Just Another Enabling Condition. International Journal of Social Robotics, 13, 1-5.
Baldursson, B., Björk, T., Johansson, L., Rickardsson, A., Widerstrand, E., Gamboa, M., & Obaid, M. (2021, March). DroRun: Drone Visual Interactions to Mediate a Running Group. In Companion of the 2021 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 148-152).
2020
Serholt, S., Pareto, L., Ekström, S., & Ljungblad, S. (2020). Trouble and Repair in Child–Robot Interaction: a study of complex interactions with a robot tutee in a primary school classroom. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7, 46.
Oertel, C., Castellano, G., Chetouani, M., Nasir, J., Obaid, M., Pelachaud, C., & Peters, C. (2020). Engagement in human-agent interaction: An overview. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 7, 92.
Phaijit, O., Obaid, M., Sammut, C., & Johal, W. (2022, March). A Taxonomy of Functional Augmented Reality for Human-Robot Interaction. In 2022 17th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 294-303). IEEE.
Sandoval, E. B., Brandstetter, J., Obaid, M., & Bartneck, C. (2016). Reciprocity in human-robot interaction: a quantitative approach through the prisoner’s dilemma and the ultimatum game. International Journal of Social Robotics, 8, 303-317.
Baytas, M. A., Funk, M., Ljungblad, S., Garcia, J., La Delfa, J., & Mueller, F. F. (2020, April). iHDI 2020: Interdisciplinary Workshop on Human-Drone Interaction. In Extended Abstracts of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-8).
2019
Baytas, M. A., Çay, D., Zhang, Y., Obaid, M., Yantaç, A. E., & Fjeld, M. (2019, May). The design of social drones: A review of studies on autonomous flyers in inhabited environments. In Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-13).
2018
Ljungblad S, Serholdt S, Milosevic T, Ni N, Toft Nørgard R, Lindgren P, Ess C, Barendregt W, Obaid M. Critical Robotics – Exploring a New Paradigm. To appear in Extended Abstracts Nordichi ACM. 2018.
Serholt, S. (2018). Breakdowns in children's interactions with a robotic tutor: A longitudinal study. Computers in Human Behavior, 81, 250-264.
Jordan, P., Mubin, O., Obaid, M., & Silva, P. A. (2018). Exploring the Referral and Usage of Science Fiction in HCI Literature. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.08395.
Obaid, M., Baykal, G. E., Yantaç, A. E., & Barendregt, W. (2018). Developing a Prototyping Method for Involving Children in the Design of Classroom Robots. International Journal of Social Robotics, 10(2), 279-291.
2017
Gao, A.Y., Barendregt, W. and Castellano, G., 2017. Personalised Human-Robot Co-Adaptation in Instructional Settings using Reinforcement Learning. In Persuasive Embodied Agents for Behavior Change (PEACH2017) Workshop at the International conference on Intelligent Virtual Agents (IVA2017).
Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Vasalou, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Jones, A., Petisca, S., & Paiva, A. (2017). The case of classroom robots: teachers’ deliberations on the ethical tensions. AI & SOCIETY, 32(4), 613-631.
Serholt, S. (2017). Child–Robot Interaction in Education. Ph.D Thesis, Gothenburg University
Romanowski, A., Mayer, S., Lischke, L., Grudzień, K., Jaworski, T., Perenc, I., ... & Wozniak, P. W. (2017, May). Towards supporting remote cheering during running races with drone technology. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 2867-2874). ACM.
Yeh, A., Ratsamee, P., Kiyokawa, K., Uranishi, Y., Mashita, T., Takemura, H., Fjeld, M. and Obaid, M., 2017, October. Exploring Proxemics for Human-Drone Interaction. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Human Agent Interaction (pp. 81-88). ACM.
2016
Hall, L., Hume, C., Tazzyman, S., Deshmukh, A., Janarthanam, S., Hastie, H., Aylett, R., Castellano, G., Papadopoulos, F., Jones, A., Corrigan, L., Paiva, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Ribeiro, T., Barendregt, W., Serholt, S., & Kappas, A. (2016, March). Map reading with an empathic robot tutor. In 2016 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) (pp. 567-567). IEEE.
Ljungblad, S., Serholt, S., Barendregt W., Lindgren, P., Obaid, M. (2016) Are we Really Addressing the Human in Human-Robot Interaction? Adopting the Phenomenologically-Situated Paradigm. In Proceedings of the International Research Conference Robophilosophy 2016: IOS Press.
Sandoval EB, Brandstetter J., Obaid, M., Bartneck C. Reciprocity in Human-Robot Interaction: A Quantitative Approach Through the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the Ultimatum Game
- International Journal of Social Robotics, 2016
Serholt, S. Barendregt, W. (2016) Robots Tutoring Children: Longitudinal Evaluation of Social Engagement in Child-Robot Interaction. In Proceedings of NordiCHI’16: ACM Press.
Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Küster, D., Jones, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., & Paiva, A. (2016). Students' Normative Perspectives on Classroom Robots. In Proceedings of the International Research Conference Robophilosophy 2016: IOS Press.
Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Vasalou, A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Jones, A., Petisca, S., & Paiva, A. (2016). The case of classroom robots: teachers’ deliberations on the ethical tensions. AI & SOCIETY, 1-19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00146-016-0667-2.
Obaid M., Evren Yantac, A., Barendregt W. Kırlangıc G., Goksun T. (2016) Robo2Box: A Toolkit to Elicit Children's Design Requirements for Classroom Robots. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Robotics 2016: Springer International Publishing, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence series (LNAI).
Colley, A., Virtanen, L., Knierim, P. and Häkkilä, J., 2017, November. Investigating drone motion as pedestrian guidance. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (pp. 143-150). ACM.
2015
Jones, A., Küster, D., Basedow, C. A., Alves-Oliveira, P., Serholt, S., Hastie, H., Corrigan, L. J., Barendregt, W., Kappas, A., Paiva, A., & Castellano, G. (2015). Empathic Robotic Tutors for Personalised Learning: A Multidisciplinary Approach. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR’15) (pp. 285-295). Springer International Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25554-5_29.
Mubin, O., Obaid, O., Barendregt, W., Simoff, S., Fjeld, M. (2015) Science Fiction and the Reality of HCI: Inspirations, Achievements or a Mismatch. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction
Mubin O., Obaid M., Sandoval, E., Fjeld M. (2015) Using Video Preferences to Understand the Human Perception of Real and Fictional Robots. Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction, 33-39
Obaid, M., Barendregt, W., Alves-Oliveira, P., Paiva, A., Fjeld, M. (2015) Designing Robotic Teaching Assistants: Interaction Design Students’ and Children’s Views. International Conference on Social Robotics, 502-511
Barendregt, W., & Serholt, S. (2015). Evaluation of an Empathic Robotic Tutor for Geography and Sustainability Learning. Paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR’15): 1st Workshop on Evaluating Child-Robot Interaction, Paris, France.
2014
Serholt, S., Basedow, C. A., Barendregt, W., & Obaid, M. (2014, November). Comparing a humanoid tutor to a human tutor delivering an instructional task to children. In Proceedings of the 2014 IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots (pp. 1134-1141). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/HUMANOIDS.2014.7041511.
Barendregt, W., Paiva, A., Kappas, A., Vasalou, A., Heath, C., Serholt, S., Basedow, C., & Alves-Oliveira, P. (2014, June). Child–robot interaction: Social bonding, learning and ethics. In Workshop proceedings of Interaction Design and Children Conference IDC14.
Sandoval, E.B., Mubin, O., & Obaid, M., Human Robot Interaction and Fiction: A Contradiction. International Conference on Social Robotics, 2014
Obaid, M. Kistler, F. Häring, M. Bühling, R. André, E. (2014) A framework for user-defined body gestures to control a humanoid robot. International Journal of Social Robotics, 2014.
Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Leite, I., Hastie, H., Jones, A., Paiva, A., Vasalou, M., Castellano, G. (2014). Teachers’ Views on the Use of Empathic Robotic Tutors in the Classroom. In Proceedings of the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN'14), Edinburgh, UK, (pp. 955-960). http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/ROMAN.2014.6926376.
Serholt, S., Barendregt W. (2014) Students’ attitudes towards the possible future of social robots in education. Paper presented at the 23rd IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN’14): Workshop on Philosophical Perspectives of HRI, Edinburgh, Scotland, UK.
2013
Castellano, G., Paiva, A., Kappas, A., Aylett, R., Hastie, H., Barendregt, W., Nabais, F., Bull, S. (2013, July). Towards empathic virtual and robotic tutors. In International Conference on Artificial Intelligence in Education (pp. 733-736). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.
Deshmukh, A., Castellano, G., Kappas, A., Barendregt, W., Nabais, F., Paiva, A., Ribeiro, T., Leite, I., & Aylett, R. (2013, March). Towards empathic artificial tutors. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-robot interaction (pp. 113-114). IEEE Press.
Serholt, S., Barendregt, W., Ribeiro, T., Castellano, G., Paiva, A., Kappas, A., Aylett, R., & Nabais, F. (2013). EMOTE: Embodied-perceptive tutors for empathy-based learning in a game environment. In: Escudeiro P and Vaz de Carvalho C (eds) Proceedings of the 7th European Conference on Games Based Learning (ECGBL'13). Porto, Portugal, 790-792. Academic Conferences International Limited.
Jacobsson, M., Fernaeus, Y., Cramer, H., Ljungblad, S. (2013) Crafting against robotic fakelore: on the critical practice of artbot artists. In CHI'13 Extended Abstracts
Are you interested in our research and want to collaborate with us?
Please contact Sara Ljungblad