Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematics (MASK)
<|reference_start|>Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematics (MASK): This paper 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 (MASK), 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 MASK 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.<|reference_end|>
@article{park2024towards,
    title={Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading
  Animated Social Kinematics (MASK)},
    author={Jeongeun Park, Taemoon Jeong, Hyeonseong Kim, Taehyun Byun, Seungyoon
  Shin, Keunjun Choi, Jaewoon Kwon, Taeyoon Lee, Matthew Pan, and Sungjoon Choi},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.10041},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2403.10041},
    primaryClass={cs.RO cs.AI}
}