Related papers: eBear: An Expressive Bear-Like Robot

Collaborative interactions require social robots to adapt to the dynamics of human affective behaviour. Yet, current approaches for affective behaviour generation in robots focus on instantaneous perception to generate a one-to-one mapping…

The increased interest in developing next-gen social robots has raised questions about the factors affecting the perception of robot emotions. This study investigates the impact of robot appearances (humanlike, mechanical) and face regions…

Virtual and robotic agents capable of perceiving human empathy have the potential to participate in engaging and meaningful human-machine interactions that support human well-being. Prior research in computational empathy has focused on…

Social robots aim to establish long-term bonds with humans through engaging conversation. However, traditional conversational approaches, reliant on scripted interactions, often fall short in maintaining engaging conversations. This paper…

This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to re-use the approach with different kind of…

In this paper, we study the problem of autonomously seating a teddy bear on a previously unseen chair. To achieve this goal, we present a novel method for robots to imagine the sitting pose of the bear by physically simulating a virtual…

Accurate facial expression imitation on human-face robots is crucial for achieving natural human-robot interaction. Most existing methods have achieved photorealistic expression imitation through mapping 2D facial landmarks to a robot's…

Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…

Explanations constitute an important aspect of successful human robot interactions and can enhance robot understanding. To improve the understanding of the robot, we have developed four levels of explanation (LOE) based on two questions:…

Several works have developed end-to-end pipelines for generating lip-synced talking faces with various real-world applications, such as teaching and language translation in videos. However, these prior works fail to create realistic-looking…

Humans are arguably innately prepared to comprehend others' emotional expressions from subtle body movements. If robots or computers can be empowered with this capability, a number of robotic applications become possible. Automatically…

How should a companion robot behave? In this research, we present a cognitive architecture based on a tailored personality model to investigate the impact of robotic personalities on the perception of companion robots. Drawing from existing…

This paper introduces EmpathyEar, a pioneering open-source, avatar-based multimodal empathetic chatbot, to fill the gap in traditional text-only empathetic response generation (ERG) systems. Leveraging the advancements of a large language…

Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…

Equipping robotic faces with singing capabilities is crucial for empathetic Human-Robot Interaction. However, existing robotic face driving research primarily focuses on conversations or mimicking static expressions, struggling to meet the…

Today, as seen in smart speakers, spoken dialogue technology is rapidly advancing to enable human-like interaction. However, current dialogue systems cannot pay attention not only to the content of speech, but also to the way of speaking…

Generative AI systems are increasingly capable of expressing emotions via text and imagery. Effective emotional expression will likely play a major role in the efficacy of AI systems -- particularly those designed to support human mental…

Embodied avatars as virtual agents have many applications and provide benefits over disembodied agents, allowing non-verbal social and interactional cues to be leveraged, in a similar manner to how humans interact with each other. We…

Emotional concepts play a huge role in our daily life since they take part into many cognitive processes: from the perception of the environment around us to different learning processes and natural communication. Social robots need to…

Technology has become an essential part in every aspect of our lives. However the key to a successful implementation of a technology depends on the acceptance by the general public. In order to increase the acceptance various approaches can…