Related papers: A Biomimetic Vocalisation System for MiRo
Embodiment of users within robotic systems has been explored in human-robot interaction, most often in telepresence and teleoperation. In these applications, synchronized visuomotor feedback can evoke a sense of body ownership and agency,…
As robots enter everyday spaces like offices, the sounds they create affect how they are perceived. We present Music Mode, a novel mapping between a robot's joint motions and sounds, programmed by artists and engineers to make the robot…
YOLO is a social robot designed and developed to stimulate creativity in children through storytelling activities. Children use it as a character in their stories. This article details the artificial intelligence software developed for…
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…
This paper introduces our approach to building a robot with communication capability based on the two key features: stochastic neural dynamics and prediction error minimization (PEM). A preliminary experiment with humanoid robots showed…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
Voice imitation aims to transform source speech to match a reference speaker's timbre and speaking style while preserving linguistic content. A straightforward approach is to train on triplets of (source, reference, target), where source…
Humans vary their expressivity when speaking for extended periods to maintain engagement with their listener. Although social robots tend to be deployed with ``expressive'' joyful voices, they lack this long-term variation found in human…
The gaze of a person tends to reflect their interest. This work explores what happens when this statement is taken literally and applied to robots. Here we present a robot system that employs a moving robot head with a screen-based eye…
Translating human intent into robot commands is crucial for the future of service robots in an aging society. Existing Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems relying on gestures or verbal commands are impractical for the elderly due to…
Conversational AIs, or chatbots, mimic human speech when conversing. Smart assistants facilitate the automation of several tasks that needed human intervention earlier. Because of their accuracy, absence of dependence on human resources,…
The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in the physical world necessitates voice-based interfaces capable of handling complex user experiences. While modern Large Language Models (LLMs) already demonstrate strong tool-usage…
Vision research showed remarkable success in understanding our world, propelled by datasets of images and videos. Sensor data from radar, LiDAR and cameras supports research in robotics and autonomous driving for at least a decade. However,…
Loneliness is a distressing personal experience and a growing social issue. Social robots could alleviate the pain of loneliness, particularly for those who lack in-person interaction. This paper investigated how the effect of loneliness on…
This paper presents our recent research on integrating artificial emotional intelligence in a social robot (Ryan) and studies the robot's effectiveness in engaging older adults. Ryan is a socially assistive robot designed to provide…
We address the problem of sound representation and classification and present results of a comparative study in the context of a domestic robotic scenario. A dataset of sounds was recorded in realistic conditions (background noise, presence…
Multimodal research and applications are becoming more commonplace as Virtual Reality (VR) technology integrates different sensory feedback, enabling the recreation of real spaces in an audio-visual context. Within VR experiences, numerous…
While multi-robot systems have been broadly researched and deployed, their success is built chiefly upon the dependency on network infrastructures, whether wired or wireless. Aiming at the first steps toward de-coupling the application of…
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder find robots easier to communicate with than humans. Thus, robots have been introduced in autism therapies. However, due to the environmental complexity, the used robots often have to be controlled…
Visual imitation learning (VIL) provides an efficient and intuitive strategy for robotic systems to acquire novel skills. Recent advancements in foundation models, particularly Vision Language Models (VLMs), have demonstrated remarkable…