Jina Lee | Peer Review

Conference Paper | The Helpless Soft Robot – Stimulating Human Collaboration through Robotic Movement

This paper focuses on figuring out how to effectively collaborate human and soft robots through signaling and stimulations.

Anna Dagmar Bille Milthers, Anne Bjerre Hammer, Jonathan Jung Johansen, Lasse Goul Jensen, Elizabeth Ann Jochum, and Markus Löchtefeld. 2019. The Helpless Soft Robot – Stimulating Human Collaboration through Robotic Movement. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Paper LBW2421, 1–6. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312807

Notes:

• In the abstract, the paper well addresses the reasoning in why it is important to see the collaboration between humans and soft robotics. If this problem statement was not present, I think I would have had a hard time in understanding why it is necessary to understand this.
• I didn’t know what a CCS concept was so I had to look it up. The digram had clear instructions but I did not understand the direct connections and background.
• The introduction helped visualize a situation when a robot fails a task and is not able to self-correct, resulting in humans needing to assists. HRI is challenged in answering how to communicate between multi-modal interactions.
• Then, the paper goes through the steps to successfully align on the interpreting the robot’s motion to facilitate human and soft robot collaboration.
• From their experiment, it was evident that the “Help Me!” sign helped signal communication from the robot. It is important to understand the nonverbal signaling for soft robots and then finding the connection to human language and interpretation.

General Review:

1. Originality. All papers must present original work.
   1. The paper seems to present original work by citing sources that started to answer the problem with soft robotic and human collaboration.
2. Novelty. We welcome big idea and provocative papers, even if they may not be perfectly implemented. We also welcome papers that bring together different disciplines and approaches.
   1. This paper uncovers how movement patterns based on human movement / signaling are great uses for nonverbal communication for soft robots. While other papers started to look into these problems, this paper was able to actual test various types of movements to see which is more successful.
3. Relevance. All papers must be relevant to the field.
   1. The paper is relevant to the field of soft robotics by better understanding the proper ways to nonverbally communicate with soft robots so that future interactions with humans will be more smooth.
4. Soundness. A paper needs to be technologically and/or methodologically sound based on the criteria generally used for that technology or method within a given field.
   1. The paper’s methods of experiment and measurement seem to be sound. There are clear detail about what was used and how.
5. Technical detail. Please provide adequate details to indicate what was done, how the data were collected, sample size and characteristics, what type of robot was involved, etc. Authors should use correct terminology for their methods to avoid being evaluated against the incorrect set of criteria.
   1. I think that the data collected was with the correct procedures and terminology. The authors were good at providing thorough details about the steps and their process.
6. Accessibility. All papers must be written to be accessible for a broad, interdisciplinary/multidisciplinary audience.
   1. The paper was generally accessible but there were some concepts and terms that were not very clear for those not familiar in this area. I had to re-read and look up terms due to my lack of background knowledge, but overall their explanations and prefaces were helpful.

1. Do you have any conflict of interest in reviewing this paper? A “conflict of interest” is defined as follows:
   1. Ph.D. thesis advisor or advisee
   2. Postdoctoral advisor or advisee
   3. Collaborators or co-authors for the past 48 months
   4. Any other individual or institution with which the investigator has financial ties
      • No
2. Expertise. Provide your expertise in the topic area of this paper.
   1. 4 – Expert 3 – Knowledgeable 2 – Passing Knowledge 1 – No Knowledge
      • 2. Passing Knowledge
3. Summary. Please summarize what you believe are the paper’s main contributions to the field of soft robotics.Please write a short paragraph. 
   1. The paper brings into light different ways of nonverbally signaling to better understand collaboration with social robots and humans. From the conclusion, there needs to be more investigation about written and unwritten cues for people to react.
4. Strengths and Weaknesses. What are the main strengths and weaknesses of this work? Does the paper have strengths in originality and novelty?Please write a short paragraph. 
   1. This paper is strong as giving the background as to why this research is important and starting to uncover methods of signaling, however, there is still a lack of clarity for how to better communicate with social robots so more investigation is needed. I believe that the overall concept is strong, but needs more research since it is in the preliminary evaluation.
5. Soundness. Are the ideas, algorithms, results or studies technologically/methodologically sound?Please write a short paragraph arguing for the strengths and weaknesses of the work. 
   1. I believe that this paper technologically sound. There is plenty of clear instructions on how the data was collected and why. In addition, the authors provided plenty of terminology to express their concept.
6. Related Work. Does the paper adequately describe related and prior work?Please write a sentence or short paragraph. 
   1. Because this problem space is new, there is not much related work. In the background, the authors emphasize that there are no studies for signaling behaviors robots. The references used for this paper seemed to be a big influence on the experiment.
7. Presentation. Is the paper well organized, well written and clearly presented?Please write a sentence or short paragraph. 
   1. I believe that the paper is well written and presented but can be further developed. Since this is a new concept, there are no references to how much has been covered.
8. Suggestions. Do you have suggestions for improving this paper?Please write several paragraphs detailing specific points of the paper which merit reconsideration. Be sure to address the text, figures and tables, mathematics, and grammar and spelling. 
   1. The tests could have looked into more types of movements to produce more effective results. Also, looking into getting rid of the written communication to test if that would have skewed the data. I believe that there can be more possible further research for this topic.

1. Comments to Committee (Hidden from authors). Does the paper have enough originality and importance to merit publication? Is the paper relevant to the field? These comments will NOT be sent to the authors:Please write one or more paragraphs as needed to justify your review judgement. 
   1.  This paper is relevant to the field as the area of interest is so new. However, it feels like the other references are very similar. I would be on the border for accepting this paper because there are already similar papers about it. Understanding the nonverbal communication between social robots and humans is important but needs to be further refined.
2. Overall Rating. Provide your overall rating of the paper (5 is best)
   1. 5 – Definite accept: I would argue strongly for accepting this paper.
   2. 4 – Probably accept: I would argue for accepting this paper.
   3. 3 – Borderline: Overall I would not argue for accepting this paper.
   4. 2 – Probably reject: I would argue for rejecting this paper.
   5. 1 – Definite reject: I would argue strongly for rejecting this paper.
      • 3