Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematic (MASK)
Jeongeun Park, Taemoon Jeong, Hyeonseong Kim, Taehyun Byun, Seungyoun Shin, Keunjun Choi, Jaewoon Kwon, Taeyoon Lee
Abstract
This letter presents the design and development of an innovative interactive robotic system to enhance audience engagement using character-like personas. Built upon the foundations of persona-driven dialog agents, this work extends the agent's application to the physical realm, employing robots to provide a more captivating and interactive experience. The proposed system, named the Masquerading Animated Social Kinematic (<sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MASK</small>), leverages an anthropomorphic robot which interacts with guests using non-verbal interactions, including facial expressions and gestures. A behavior generation system based upon a finite-state machine structure effectively conditions robotic behavior to convey distinct personas. The <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">MASK</small> framework integrates a perception engine, a behavior selection engine, and a comprehensive action library to enable real-time, dynamic interactions with minimal human intervention in behavior design. Throughout the user subject studies, we examined whether the users could recognize the intended character in both personality- and film-character-based persona conditions. We conclude by discussing the role of personas in interactive agents and the factors to consider for creating an engaging user experience.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{ral2024_towardsembedding,
title = {Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematic (MASK)},
author = {Jeongeun Park and Taemoon Jeong and Hyeonseong Kim and Taehyun Byun and Seungyoun Shin and Keunjun Choi and Jaewoon Kwon and Taeyoon Lee and Matthew K. X. J. Pan and Sungjoon Choi},
booktitle = {RA-L 2024},
year = {2024}
}