This thesis seeks to make developing multi-robot comedy performances more accessible to developers and performers, and suggests the use of duo comedy for robot-run research experiments. It involved four main steps: technology development, experimental deployments in the general public, the development of the Multi-Robot Comedy Performance System, and an analysis...
Expressive motion has been found to be a highly effective tool in communicating intent and motivation in single robot human-robot interaction, but work in exploring how groups of robots can use motion in interactions with humans is relatively nascent. There are many additional complexities to consider expanding from single robot...
This thesis follows two studies performed with simple robots. The first follows a robot interacting with eight improvisers to create scenes and perform five isolated gestures (towards, away, sideways, spin, and circle) for interpretation. The second follows a group of three robots performing the same five isolated gestures at two...
A chair, once placed, will stay put until moved. Or will it? With the rise of technology being embeddable into everyday objects, what if that chair could move itself? Such robotic furniture has been featured in advertisements, art, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. Existing methods for operating robotic furniture have...
Bud break is a key adaptive trait that can help us understand how plants respond to a changing climate from the molecular to landscape scale. Despite this, acquisition of bud break data is currently constrained by cost, scale, and a lack of information at the plant scale on the environmental...
The relative enrichment of skin sebaceous gland lipids with deuterium-labeled α-tocopherol was compared with plasma enrichment to evaluate the delivery of vitamin E to skin. For the first week of this study, each subject consumed a daily dose of deuterated vitamin E (150 mg of an equimolar mixture of RRR-α-[5-(C²H₃)]-(d₃)...
The study focuses on how to use entertainment method approach to prompt people with best practices for COVID safety. During COVID times, there have been many robots deployed in public places such as social distancing enforcer or a robot that provide facial masks, but few investigations have been done to...
User studies in human-robot interaction and social robotics in general involve human participants and their reactions, observations and expectations of robots. This thesis presents two innovative experimental methods aimed at gaining access to high-stakes social data not typically collectable with traditional user studies. The Actor Method provides access to data...
Climate exerts considerable control on wildfire regimes, and climate and wildfire are both major drivers of forest growth and succession in interior Northwest forests. Estimating potential response of these landscapes to anticipated changes in climate helps researchers and land managers understand and mitigate impacts of climate change on important ecological...
We do not fully understand reasons behind extinction of populations and species. Consequently, our ability to anticipate extinction (which can be considered a permanent type of an ecological threshold) has remained elusive. In particular, it is not clear how the attributes of episodic disturbance regimes can elicit extinction. In this...