Welcome to the SERA Showcase

The SERA Showcase presents lessons learnt from the EU project SERA (Social Engagement with Robots and Agents, FP7 no.231868) that ended in December 2010, after two years. Its aim was to advance science in the field of social acceptability of verbally interactive robots and agents, with a view to their applications especially in assistive technologies, e.g. companions. This showcase assembles Demonstrations and Background Material to give an overview of the project and its results.

Companions, as we understood them in this project, are robots or virtual characters for assistive household use. They should be useful, socially capable, and entertaining, and not just for a day, but ideally, for years. Read more on the background story.

Scenarios of long-term assistive companions raise multiple challenges for research, such as:

• What are the prerequisites for human-companion long-term relationships? Which theories can we build on? Read more on the theory of companions.
• What capabilities does a companion actually need? What are the key features of a long-term companion? Read more on the reference architecture.
• The project SERA set out to do research on how older persons actually relate to a companion in their homes, and over time. To this aim, the project has undertaken a field study in three iterations to collect data of real-life, long-term and open-ended relationships of subjects with robotic devices. Read more on the field study.

This video demonstrates the set-up of the field study. The human is an actor (for obvious privacy reasons), but the companion is set up exactly as it was deployed in the study.

Download a copy of the video

The first and strongest conclusion from analysis of the data is: there are as many ways of interacting with and relating to a companion as there are users. What is more, the expectations and styles do not only vary from person to person, but also, in an individual, over time. While one person approaches the companion mainly as a tool, it is a friendly presence for another. The one always takes the initiative in the interaction, the other enjoys being addressed by a pro-active companion. One day, the user stops to talk to the companion, the other day they just press a button when they pass by. Read more on the results of data analysis.

• Background Story
• Theory of Companions
• SERA Field Study
  • The scenario
  • How the field study was done
  • The set-up
  • How data were collected
• Reference Architecture
• Data Analysis Results
• Demonstrations
  • The system setup in the field study
  • Scripting System
  • Interaction Episodes
  • Floor Management in SERA’s reference architecture
• Preparations
  • Components
  • Requirements
  • Starting Demos
  • Setup of the Nabaztag hardware
  • Configuration of RFID tags
  • Setup of Speech Server and Voice Output
• Background Material

The most recent version of this showcase is available at http://showcase.project-sera.eu/. The original version of this showcase is also described in Deliverables D4.2 & D4.3 of the SERA project. For comments, suggestions, corrections, praise or complaints please contact Sabine Payr, OFAI, Freyung 6/6, A-1010 Vienna, Austria (project coordinator):

sera_info [AT] ofai.at