Related papers: Planning Based System for Child-Robot Interaction …
Facial expressiveness plays a crucial role in a robot's ability to engage and interact with children. Prior research has shown that expressive robots can enhance child engagement during human-robot interactions. However, many robots used in…
Communication in both human-human and human-robot interac-tion (HRI) contexts consists of verbal (speech-based) and non-verbal(facial expressions, eye gaze, gesture, body pose, etc.) components.The verbal component contains semantic and…
Human-robot collaboration is on the rise. Robots need to increasingly improve the efficiency and smoothness with which they assist humans by properly anticipating a human's intention. To do so, prediction models need to increase their…
In human-robot interaction (HRI), the beginning of an interaction is often complex. Whether the robot should communicate with the human is dependent on several situational factors (e.g., the current human's activity, urgency of the…
Successful entrainment during collaboration positively affects trust, willingness to collaborate, and likeability towards collaborators. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study to investigate characteristics of successful entrainment…
Social robots have been used to assist with mental well-being in various ways such as to help children with autism improve on their social skills and executive functioning such as joint attention and bodily awareness. They are also used to…
Human safety is the most important demand for human robot interaction and collaboration (HRIC), which not only refers to physical safety, but also includes psychological safety. Although many robots with different configurations have…
Hardware platforms for socially interactive robotics can be limited by cost or lack of functionality. This paper presents the overall system -- design, hardware, and software -- for Quori, a novel, affordable, socially interactive humanoid…
In recent years, the demand for social robots has grown, requiring them to adapt their behaviors based on users' states. Accurately assessing user experience (UX) in human-robot interaction (HRI) is crucial for achieving this adaptability.…
Intelligent robots and machines are becoming pervasive in human populated environments. A desirable capability of these agents is to respond to goal-oriented commands by autonomously constructing task plans. However, such autonomy can add…
Physical agents that can autonomously generate engaging, life-like behaviour will lead to more responsive and interesting robots and other autonomous systems. Although many advances have been made for one-to-one interactions in well…
This paper presents a novel framework for accessible and pedagogically-grounded robot explainability, designed to support human-robot interaction (HRI) with users who have diverse cognitive, communicative, or learning needs. We combine…
In this paper, we present the Role Playing Learning (RPL) scheme for a mobile robot to navigate socially with its human companion in populated environments. Neural networks (NN) are constructed to parameterize a stochastic policy that…
In this paper, we consider the problem of designing collision-free, dynamically feasible, and socially-aware trajectories for robots operating in environments populated by humans. We define trajectories to be social-aware if they do not…
Though a goal of HRI is the natural integration of social robots into everyday public spaces, real-world studies still occur mostly within controlled environments with predetermined participants. True public spaces present an environment…
This work explores a group learning scenario with an autonomous empathic robot. We address two research questions: (1) Can an autonomous robot designed with empathic competencies foster collaborative learning in a group context? (2) Can an…
Understanding how humans respond to uncertainty is critical for designing safe and effective physical human-robot interaction (pHRI), as physically working with robots introduces multiple sources of uncertainty, including trust, comfort,…
We introduce Robix, a unified model that integrates robot reasoning, task planning, and natural language interaction within a single vision-language architecture. Acting as the high-level cognitive layer in a hierarchical robot system,…
Recent advances in machine learning have paved the way for the development of musical and entertainment robots. However, human-robot cooperative instrument playing remains a challenge, particularly due to the intricate motor coordination…
Training robots with physical bodies requires developing new methods and action representations that allow the learning agents to explore the space of policies efficiently. This work studies sample-efficient learning of complex policies in…