Course Project

The course project is your chance to gain hands on HRI research experience. I highly recommend that you complete this project in a group of 2 or 3. If you wish to complete your project individually, please email me to discuss further. This project must be focused on the interaction between physically embodied robots and 1 or more people. This page contains details on the project deliverables, due dates, as well as suggestions for possible projects (at the bottom of the page).

Project Deliverables & Due Dates

Submission of Project Deliverables

Please make a Google Drive folder for your project team that you share with me (sarahsebo@uchicago.edu). You'll turn in of all your project deliverables to this Google Drive folder.

Draft Project Proposal

The draft proposal should be 1-2 pages in length and describe 1) the research question you are investigating and any related hypotheses, 2) the methods you expect to use to answer your research question, and 3) how you plan to evaluate whether or not you've answered your research question. Please share your project proposal with me by putting it in your group's Google Drive folder (see "Submission of Project Deliverables" above).

Finalized Project Proposal

The finalized project proposal, in addition to what is contained in the draft proposal, should detail a detailed timeline with corresponding intermediate deliverables. Before submitting your final project proposal, please set up a meeting with me to discuss and refine your proposed project in the date range of Tue-Fri, Oct 13-16. Please either Slack or email me (sarahsebo@uchicago.edu) to setup a 30 minute meeting with me 1) during office hours or 2) another time when I'm free (please check out my busy/free calendar before suggesting meeting times).

Progress Reports

The progress report should contain:

• An update on your progress relative to your project proposal timeline
• The accomplishments you've made
• Any unexpected roadblocks you've encountered
• An updated timeline of how you plan to complete the project

Project Presentation

You will present the work that you've done in your course project on either December 2 or December 4. Since there are 4 project teams this year, 2 groups will present on December 2 and 2 groups will present on December 4. You should aim for your presentation to take 15 minutes, leaving 10 minutes for Q&A (I will plan to cut you off if you go beyond 16 minutes). All members of your team are expected to participate in the presentation. Your presentation should highlight the following:

• Motivation: Detail the research question(s) you were interested in investigating and why it's important to explore.
• Background: Describe any relevant background literature and tell us what unique and novel contributions your study is making beyond what already exists in the literature.
• Methods: Describe your study design (experimental conditions), hypotheses, study protocol (videos are great for this), and the measures you used to assess your hypotheses.
• Results: Report on the results you found. Please include all of the main measures, regardless of whether or not you found significant differences.
• Discussion/Implications: Reflect on the broader implications and takeaways from your results.
• Challenges: Describe your main challenges in conducting your research project and how you addressed them.
• Learning Outcomes: Enumerate some "lessons learned" from this project, what you learned by going out and actually conducting HRI research, beyond what you've learned from reading the papers in this class.

Please upload your presentation slides to your team's Google drive folder.

Final Report

The project report should be written in the style of an academic conference paper (like the papers we've been reading for our class discussions), feel free to use the ACM templates for conferences. The report should have the following sections: abstract, introduction, background, methods, results, discussion, conclusion, and contributions. The abstract - conclusion sections should resemble the papers we have read and discussed in this course. The contributions section should detail the contributions of each team member, detailing which portions of the project were completed by each team member. The report should be approximately 6 pages long without references. Please both 1) send me an email of your final report and 2) upload a copy to your team's Google Drive folder.

Project Grading

The grading for the course project will be as follows:

• 25% intermediary deliverables (project pitches, proposals, progress reports)
• 10% final project presentation
• 15% final report
• 50% project work (your grade based on the work that you accomplished during the class project is not dependent on your project being a 'success', your project work will be graded based on the project's scope, novelty, and the investigative work that you put into pursuing your research questions)

Getting Started

Here are some ideas to get you thinking about what kind of project you would like to work on:

• A literature review: You could take a dive into the published work on a particular topic, analyze it, critique it, and suggest avenues for future research. There are some excellent examples of literature reviews within HRI on robots for education, gaze, and robot physical embodiment.Or you can propose a framework that summarizes and puts into perspective the work done within a particular area of HRI (e.g., this recent work on trust-relevant failures and mitigation strategies).
• Analysis of a human-robot interaction in a pre-recorded dataset: Two datasets I'm aware of are the Vernissage Dataset and the UE-HRI dataset. For a larger picture view on the use of datasets in HRI, I'd recommend checking out the Working Group on Datasets with Humans and Agents in Groups section of the Dagstuhl Seminar I recently attended on "Social Agents for Teamwork and Group Interactions".
• A human-subjects study on Amazon Mechanical Turk: Since covid-19 restrictions limit our abilities to run in-person human-robot interaction studies, a good alternative is running an online study. Here are some examples from HRI 2019:
  • Hedaoo et al. (2019) - An online study examining people's impressions of a robot making a comment to multiple people in different settings (potential romantic partners, roommates, or job colleagues) and with different valences (going well or going poorly).
  • Williams et al. (2019) - A study exploring how well people can perceive a deictic gesture from a robot with the aid of augmented reality.
  • Chita-Tegmark et al. (2019) - A study examining people's perceptions of a robot's gender and emotional intelligence in one-on-one interactions.
  • de Graaf and Malle (2019) - A study of how people ascribe mental states to robots through their explanations of robot behavior.
• An HRI project focused on addressing important current topics: There is a lot going on in the United States and the world right now, e.g., the covid-19 pandemic, racial justice movements, the upcoming election. You could, for example,
  • imagine a circumstance in which robots might be helpful given the covid-19 pandemic and run an online study to investigate it,
  • examine racial bias in HRI publications, reviewing that literature and making recommendations for ways to combat racial bias in future HRI research, or
  • compare the influence of a robot vs. a smart speaker in persuading someone to change their political opinion.

Simulated Robots & Chatbots

The most commonly used robot simulator is Gazebo, because simulated robots in Gazebo are controlled in the exact same way as their physical robot counterparts. Another simulator option is Webots.

I have never created a virtual agent / avatar, and I'm currently looking for tools to create a virtual robot using this method. I will post them here when I have updates.

I have a preference for you all exploring projects with a simulated or physical robot, however, I am open to projects using a dis-embodied chatbot.

Physical Robots

If you are interested (and it's possible given covid-19 restrictions) in using a physical robot as a part of your project, here are the robots and sensors available for you to use in my lab:

Although working with physical robots is appealing, please consider seriously this option. Getting set up with a development environment in order to program your robot takes a non-trivial amount of time. Additionally, I'm currently working on getting you access to Crerar if you would like to use a physical robot for your project, but I have not yet succeeded in doing so. Therefore, if you hope to use a physical robot in your project, please detail a backup plan in case you are not able to access the robot in Crerar or, due to covid-19 restrictions imposed during the quarter, you no longer have access to the robot in Crerar.

Another option to consider in the case that the robots in the lab can't be accessed (either because we can't get lab access, you can't physically access the lab, or you don't feel comfortable accessing the lab), is buying a cheaper (< $300-ish) robot (e.g., the Anki Vector) and mailing it to your residence. I (Sarah) would fully pay for the robot and you would be expected to return the robot to me (Sarah) and the robotics lab after the quarter.