A Bachelor Thesis in Computer Science: Developing Personality for a Wizard-Controlled Agent

Sammanfattning: As social robots are increasingly growing more popular in the world of technology, designing the optimal human-robot interaction is becoming more crucial. In this paper, the user reaction to the agent personality of awizard-controlled embodied Furhat robot called Neil, will be examined by answering two research questions. The two research questions concern whether it is possible to implement two distinct personalities in an agent that plays a RDG-Map game with a human, and if those two personalities can be expressed in a coherent way by explicitly modeling the affect. For this project, two distinct personalities were implemented in Neil in order to answer these two research questions. The personalities are called OPTand IMP Neil, and were implemented with the help of crowd-sourcing authoring method. The method allows a group of crowd-authors to author dialogue lines for given scenarios, that a participant and robot inquestion can possibly be in. For this project, 18 participants were gathered to separately play a RDG-Map game with Neil, where half of the group was assigned the OPT Neil, and the rest was assigned the IMP Neil. Results indicate that, although the IMP Neil was not as successfully implemented as the OPT Neil, it is possible to implement two distinct personalities in the given situation. Similarly, it is concluded that it also ispossible to express the two personalities in a coherent way by explicitly modeling the effect. Finally, the results show how crucial it is to carry out research to get a sense of what the user's reaction to the personalities will possibly look like.