Related papers: Exploring home robot capabilities by medium fideli…

In the real world, robots with embodiment face various issues such as dynamic continuous changes of the environment and input/output disturbances. The key to solving these issues can be found in daily life; people `do actions associated…

In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…

While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…

Physical embodiment is a required component for robots that are structurally coupled with their real-world environments. However, most socially interactive robots do not need to physically interact with their environments in order to…

Since the late 1990s when speech companies began providing their customer-service software in the market, people have gotten used to speaking to machines. As people interact more often with voice and gesture controlled machines, they expect…

Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…

Hugs are complex affective interactions that often include gestures like squeezes. We present six new guidelines for designing interactive hugging robots, which we validate through two studies with our custom robot. To achieve autonomy, we…

Socialization is an essential development skill for preschool children. In collaboration with the LEGO Group, we developed Robert Robot, a simplified robot, which enables socialization between children and facilitates shared experiences…

Robot accidents are inevitable. Although rare, they have been happening since assembly-line robots were first introduced in the 1960s. But a new generation of social robots are now becoming commonplace. Often with sophisticated embedded…

Learning companion robots for young children are increasingly adopted in informal learning environments. Although parents play a pivotal role in their children's learning, very little is known about how parents prefer to incorporate robots…

Robots often need to convey information to human users. For example, robots can leverage visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces to display their intent or express their internal state. In some scenarios there are socially agreed upon…

Nonverbal visual symbols and displays play an important role in communication when humans and robots work collaboratively. However, few studies have investigated how different types of non-verbal cues affect objective task performance,…

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…

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…

A robot operating in isolation needs to reason over the uncertainty in its model of the world and adapt its own actions to account for this uncertainty. Similarly, a robot interacting with people needs to reason over its uncertainty over…

Integrating multimodal foundation models has significantly enhanced autonomous agents' language comprehension, perception, and planning capabilities. However, while existing works adopt a \emph{task-centric} approach with minimal human…

While assistive robots have much potential to help older people with frailty-related needs, there are few in use. There is a gap between what is developed in laboratories and what would be viable in real-world contexts. Through a series of…

Our goal is to model and experimentally assess trust evolution to predict future beliefs and behaviors of human-robot teams in dynamic environments. Research suggests that maintaining trust among team members in a human-robot team is vital…

Robots and artificial machines have been captivating the public for centuries, depicted first as threats to humanity, then as subordinates and helpers. In the last decade, the booming exposure of humans to robots has fostered an increasing…

In this survey, we present the current status on robots performing manipulation tasks that require varying contact with the environment, such that the robot must either implicitly or explicitly control the contact force with the environment…