=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-3124/paper26
|storemode=property
|title=UX Personas for Defining Robot's Character and Personality
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3124/paper26.pdf
|volume=Vol-3124
|authors=Rossana Damiano,Cristina Gena,Andrea Maieli,Claudio Mattutino,Alessandro Mazzei,Elisabetta Miraglio,Giulia Ricciardiello
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/iui/DamianoGMMMMR22
}}
==UX Personas for Defining Robot's Character and Personality==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3124/paper26.pdf
UX Personas for defining robot’s character and personality
Rossana Damiano 1, Cristina Gena 1, Andrea Maieli 2, Claudio Mattutino 1, Alessandro Mazzei
1
, Elisabetta Miraglio 2, Giulia Ricciardiello 2
1
Computer Science Dept., University of Turin, corso Svizzera 185, 10149, Turin, Italy
2
ICT school, University of Turin, lungo Dora Siena 100 A, 10129, Turin, Italy
Abstract
This paper describes the use of UX Personas for defining a stable character for the Pepper
robot. This approach generated from the first analysis of the social interactions that occurred
between Pepper and a group of children with autism working with the robot in a therapeutic
laboratory on autonomy.
Keywords 1
Autism; Cognitive Robotics, Humanoid Robots
and different from their interaction with other
1. Introduction technologies and artifacts since robots provoke
emotionally and socially charged interactions. In
order to produce a more believable and engaging
The advent of the IoT offers the opportunity robot we propose to use UX Personas as a
for everybody and everything to be connected, methodology for better defining its character and
receiving and processing information in real time.
personality.
This generates a shift in production and
Personas are fictional characters, which the
consumption patterns, changing the relations designer creates based upon her research in order
between all the agents in the economic system. to represent the different user types that might use
According to a report of the World Economic service, product, site, or brand in a similar way.
forum, it is one of the largest enablers for
Creating personas helps the designer to
responsible digital transformation and it will add understand users’ needs, experiences, behaviors
$14 trillion of economic value to the global
and goals.
economy by 2030 [13]. This paper describes the use of UX Personas
In this smart space the user becomes the center
for defining a stable character for the Pepper
of informative systems made of ambient and robot. This approach generated from the first
personal sensors, including social robots, analysis of the social interactions that occurred
communicative tools, mobile and ubiquitous between Pepper and a group of children with
computing devices, and assumes responsibilities autism working with the robot in a therapeutic
traditionally intended for developers. In this laboratory on autonomy.
context, social and humanoid robots will play an This paper is organized as follows: Section 2
important role: they can be seen as integrated sets describes the related work in the field, while
of sensors and actuators, thus IoT platforms will Section 3 introduces our proposal, and Section 4
make it easier to monitor and control them [7] [15] concludes the paper.
. Differently from other smart things, robots call
for interactions. According to Young et al. [14]
the way people interact with robots is very unique
Rossana Damiano et al. 2022. UX Personas for defining robot’s
character and personality. In Joint Proceedings of the ACM IUI
2022 Workshops. Helsinki, Finland, 4 pages EMAIL:
cristina.gena@unito.it
ORCID: 0000-0003-0049-6213
© 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors. Use permitted under Creative
Commons License Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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2. Related work which are capable of engaging the users in
different cultural contexts. The methodology
relies on two main tenets: on the one side, the
Personas, also known as “characters”, are an
robot must be assigned a role that can be
archetype of the users a project is aimed at. It is a
recognised by the user (e.g. a receptionist) and on
useful tool for identifying the actions, behaviors,
the other side, it must evolve along time, so as to
needs, aspirations and difficulties of the users of a
keep the user’s engagement alive throughout the
particular service and are the result of the union of
repeated encounters with the robot. So, the design
various information collected during the study of
consists of creating not only a backstory for the
the target. Personas were conceived by Alan
character, but also a set of story lines that emerge
Cooper in 1998 [2] as a tool to follow during the
from the interaction with the user.
design process, but this concept should not be
The development of personas in our project
confused with the average user, because Personas
acknowledges the relevance of dramatic elements
embody within them the objectives of a single
in the design of robot characters, combined with
group of people, while retaining certain personal
the use of HCI techniques and conducted in
characteristics. The UX design teams use
cooperation with a multi-disciplinary team which
Personas as a reference when designing digital
includes therapists and experts.
interfaces and as a useful tool to guide design
choices, including for example the features to be
inserted and navigation, because the needs of real 3. Personas for Pepper
users are always taken into consideration.
Personas have been applied in many HCI projects The Sugar, Salt & Pepper - Humanoid robotics for
since Cooper, with focus on better user experience autism - research project focuses on the use of the
than before, probably due to the easy Pepper robot in a therapeutic laboratory on
communication about Personas needs between autonomy that aims to promote functional
designers. Because of this, some researchers have acquisitions in highly functioning (Asperger)
used it also in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) children with autism.
with the aim to improve robots’ behaviors during During the laboratory, started at the end of
interaction. However, many HRI researchers have February 2021 in an apartment of the Paideia
been exploring Robot Personas that change the Foundation, we wanted to test the exchanges and
focus [9]. Robot Personas are robots, which interactions of children in rehabilitation contexts
assume some profiles designed to get direction with the robot helping the operators. Another goal
between interactions with people. It works like a of the project was to provide young participants
mental model for robots [4][6][11]. with a space for increasing their skills of mutual
In parallel with this trend, inspiration for the communication and socialization and strengthen
design of robotic characters has come from drama the acquisition of strategies related to daily
studies. Since the seminal work of Laurel [8], activities, such as the preparation of a snack or the
performance has been proposed as a paradigm for management of homework, with the help of
digital scenarios: with the advent of robots, new Pepper, configured as a highly motivating and
opportunities have arisen and their design as engaging tool.
partners and assistants for humans and their use in The weekly meetings lasted one hour and were led
performance have become tightly intertwined. by a therapist. Each meeting had this structure:
Thanks to their unique combination of welcome in the apartment managed by the robot
proactiveness and stage presence, robot actors and the therapists; dialogue session with the robot
have been employed to develop new on a predetermined topic (e.g., music, video
improvisational and interactive forms of games, etc.); moment of snack preparation;
performance [1]. In robotics, the techniques moment of post-snack dialogue and final
employed by drama practitioners to design feedback.
engaging characters have been borrowed by During the first sessions that were carried out, the
scholars to create believable robots who display a robot was totally devoid of a personality and
personality and evolve over time, as described by character of its own. The robot limited itself to
[12]. Drawing from the notion of “suspension of listening and answering the questions that were
disbelief” stated by character animators since asked, through pre-recorded sentences (and which
long, [12] proposed a methodology which relies were updated from session to session) on its
on character design techniques to create robots program. From an HCI point of view, this rather
cumbersome method turned out to be totally
inefficient and counter productive; the young
participants immediately realized that the
questions that were asked were not the work of an
AI operation, but of manual input by the
operators. Most of them, having understood the
game, enjoyed asking goliardic questions, or to
which the robot was unable to answer, thus ending
up getting funny and senseless answers; in some
cases they even managed to send it on tilt.
For this reason, we decided to develop a
personality that could be given to the robot: this
was possible thanks to the analysis of the main
questions and interests that emerged during the
sessions with the children, as described in [3].
However, due to time constraints it was not
possible to implement it in the robot. However,
this remains a preparatory work for the future
implementations.
We believe that personality is one of the most
important aspects in a conversation, because it
identifies the character of the interlocutor, thus
4. Conclusion and future work
making it possible to choose which phrases to use
to make it more effective and which ones not. As described in the analysis reported in [1], we
In the following tables, it is possible to observe realized that the robot personality and its
the implementation of the information necessary character should be better defined and detailed in
for the construction of the robot personality, order to satisfy the curiosity and the expectations
approached in a Personas style. These are divided of children, and to make it more credible and
into: engaging. At the moment, the robot often does not
• Background information: physical appearance know how to answer the questions or does not
of the robot, its biography, personality and family understand them, and this generates friction and
ties (see Table 1); nervousness in children. So, we realized that we
• Interests: knowledge, skills and tastes (Tables need to work more on its dialogue strategies and
2-3-4-5-6); on enriching its knowledge. At the dialogue level,
• Goals: short and long term goals (Tables 7-8). giving the robot a richer personality that it can
It must obviously be taken into account that this convey through language, would constrain the
personality has been made as simple as possible expectations of the children to a more tractable
given the target users to which it interfaced. set of topics, and create justifications for its
inadequacies.
At the current stage, the software architecture of
the robot in our project encompasses a specialized
module for casual conversation with autistic
children, developed based on a set of experimental
interactions with the children in real settings,
which supports the believability of the robot
character as an expert in a set of restricted
domains through external knowledge sources.
The current architecture does not include a
reinforcement learning component, but this
element may be integrated in the robot to gain
advantage from the monitoring of the responses of
the children during the use of the robot on the
field.
As future work, we are also working on the
adaptive mechanisms with which Pepper will be
enriched. The robot will show more and more [5] Freita dos Santos, T. & Castro, D. G. &
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