November 10, 2019

Shikhar Kumar

Topic:  Older adults’ interaction with robots (ESR 15)

Email: shikhar@post.bgu.ac.il

Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Yael Edan

I was awarded a master of technology in electrical engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (Indian school of mines), Dhanbad. I am born and brought up in India.

Research project: The effect of dynamic interaction on user:  Evaluation of politeness in HRI

Summary of Research

Social and functional aspect of interaction plays a vital role in the acceptance of robotic technology. Politeness, one aspect of social behaviour in human-human interaction is known to increase coordination amongst individuals and remove conflicts. To increase the acceptability of robots amongst older adults, this research is focused on developing and evaluating the effect of politeness in human-robot interaction. Politeness has been developed with the help of theory defined in the socio-linguistic field. Based on Lakoff theory of politeness, three different levels of politeness were developed for a table setting task with a robotic manipulator. An empirical study was conducted with three different levels of politeness among four groups. The groups included students with engineering background, non-engineering students without prior training, non-engineering student with prior training and older adults.

List of Publication

S. Kumar, E. Itzhak, S. Olatunji, V. Sarne-Fleischmann, N. Tractinsky, G. Nimrod, Y. Edan. 2019. Exploratory evaluation of politeness in human-robot interaction. Quality of Interaction in Socially Assistive Robots (QISAR) Workshop at International Conference on Social Robotics (ICSR’19) – Madrid, Spain, November 26-29.

Video link https://youtu.be/oCCluqhcgOQ

Github- https://github.com/shikharkumar1993