TheatreBot

TheatreBot
Short Description:	Aim of this project is to produce autonomous robots able to play on stage together with human actors, possibly improvising, or in any case facing the casualities occurring on the scene.
Coordinator:	AndreaBonarini (andrea.bonarini@polimi.it)
Tutor:	AndreaBonarini (andrea.bonarini@polimi.it)
Collaborator:
Students:	JulianMauricioAngelFernandez (julianmauricio.angel@polimi.it)
Research Area:	Robotics
Research Topic:	Robot development
Start:	2013/01/12
End:	2016/12/31
Status:	Active
Level:	PhD
Type:	Thesis

Human social interactions are based on the correct response to specific situations. If someone does not response in the expected way, is margined by the others. Thus, robots that interact with humans outside of manufacture places, as home, office, classroom and public spaces. They should not only accomplish their task, but also be accepted by humans, which means that them feel comfortable of robots presence. As a consequence, social robots must have the capacity to show emotions. However, build robots than could accomplish its task and show emotion is not an easy job due to the difficulty to select the correct emotion, show the emotion in a way that could be understandable by humans, and all the traditional problems to do a given task. This makes crucial find an environment that allow us research on produce effective social and emotional interaction, without the need for other abilities (e.g., emotion detection, status detection, person recognition, etc.).

Although several researches have suggested that theatre could be an excellent place to test social and emotional abilities [4]-[8], due to theatre constrains as known what to say, how react, where is expected to be the object and other actors, all of these given before hand in a script, the few works [9]-[19] that have been doing in the last decade have been used theatre as an environment to create robots that could accomplish entertainment task, without worrying about the use theatre actor’s training theories to project emotions to the audience. As a consequence, TheatreBot pretends exploit theatre constraints to build a robotic platform and software that allow the robot to be an actor in theatre and not just as prop, as currently has being happening. The system and platform have been thinking to allow extension to others areas where showing emotions are important as: in robot games and assistive robots. To accomplish this goal, the robot will use a relational social and social model of the world to represent its character’s feelings and belief about the world. Besides, it is used the concept of emotional state to add emotional features on actions, avoiding the hard-coding of all actions that robot should execute.

Roughly, the software architecture is compound by the following sub-systems:

• Belief
• Action Decision
• Action Modulation
• Description
• Motivation

Why Theatre?

Theatre is considered as lively art [1]. Thanks to theatre characteristics, constraints and actors’ lessons, it is an excellent place to test coordination and expressiveness in robots, and actors training systems [1]–[3] can inspire the development of expressive robots.

References

[1] E. Wilson and A. Goldfarb, Theatre: The Lively Art. McGraw-Hill Education, 2009. [2] J. Cavanaugh, Acting Means Doing !!: Here Are All the Techniques You Need, Carrying You Confidently from Auditions Through Rehearsals - Blocking, Characterization - Into Performances, All the Way to Curtain Calls. CreateSpace, 2012. [3] S. Genevieve, Delsarte System of Dramatic Expression. BiblioBazaar, 2009. [4] G. Hoffman, “On stage: Robots as performers,” RSS 2011 Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction: Perspectives and Contributions to Robotics from the Human Sciences, 2009. [5] C. Breazeal, A. Brooks, J. Gray, M. Hancher, C. Kidd, J. McBean, D. Stiehl, and J. Strickon, “Interactive robot theatre,” in Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2003. (IROS 2003). Proceedings. 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, vol. 4, 2003, pp. 3648–3655 vol.3. [6] C.-Y. Lin, L.-C. Cheng, C.-C. Huang, L.-W. Chuang, W.-C. Teng, C.- H. Kuo, H.-Y. Gu, K.-L. Chung, and C.-S. Fahn, “Versatile humanoid robots for theatrical performances,” International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2013. [7] D. V. Lu and W. D. Smart, “Human-robot interactions as theatre,” in RO-MAN 2011. IEEE, 2011, pp. 473–478. [8] C. Pinhanez, “Computer theater,” in Proc. of the Eighth International Symposium on Electronic Arts (ISEA’97), 1997. [9] C.-Y. Lin, L.-C. Cheng, C.-C. Huang, L.-W. Chuang, W.-C. Teng, C.- H. Kuo, H.-Y. Gu, K.-L. Chung, and C.-S. Fahn, “Versatile humanoid robots for theatrical performances,” International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems, 2013. [10] H. Knight, S. Satkin, V. Ramakrishna, and S. Divvala, “A savvy robot standup comic: Online learning through audience tracking,” TEI 2011, January 2011. [11] H. Knight, “Heather knight: la comedia de silicio,” TED Ideas Worth Spreading, December 2010. [Online]. Available: http://www.ted.com/ talks/heather knight silicon based comedy.html [12] K. R. Wurst, “I comici roboti: Performing the lazzo of the statue from the commedia dell’arte,” in AAAI Mobile Robot Competition, 2002, pp. 124–128. [13] A. Bruce, J. Knight, and I. R. Nourbakhsh, “Robot improv: Using drama to create believable agents,” in In AAAI Workshop Technical Report WS- 99-15 of the 8th Mobile Robot Competition and Exhibition. AAAI Press, Menlo, 2000, pp. 27–33. [14] LAAS-CNRS, “Roboscopie, the robot takes the stage!” Internet. [Online]. Available: http://www.openrobots.org/wiki/roboscopie [15] S. Lemaignan, M. Gharbi, J. Mainprice, M. Herrb, and R. Alami, “Roboscopie: a theatre performance for a human and a robot,” in Proceedings of the seventh annual ACM/IEEE international conference on Human-Robot Interaction, ser. HRI ’12. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2012, pp. 427–428. [16] C.-Y. Lin, C.-K. Tseng, W.-C. Teng, W. chen Lee, C.-H. Kuo, H.-Y. Gu, K.-L. Chung, and C.-S. Fahn, “The realization of robot theater: Humanoid robots and theatric performance,” in International Conference on Advanced Robotics, 2009. ICAR 2009., 2009. [17] G. Hoffman, R. Kubat, and C. Breazeal, “A hybrid control system for puppeteering a live robotic stage actor,” in RO-MAN 2008, M. Buss and K. K¨uhnlenz, Eds. IEEE, 2008, pp. 354–359. [18] Z. Par´e, “Robot drama research: from identification to synchronization,” in Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Robotics, ser. ICSR’12. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012, pp. 308–316. [19] I. Torres, “Robots share the stage with human actors in osaka university’s ’robot theater project’,” Japandaily Press, February 2013.