Related papers: A Research Platform for Multi-Robot Dialogue with …
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language…
As robots enter collaborative workspaces, ensuring mutual understanding between human workers and robotic systems becomes a prerequisite for trust, safety, and efficiency. In this position paper, we draw on the cooperation scenario of the…
Service and assistive robots are increasingly being deployed in dynamic social environments; however, ensuring transparent and explainable interactions remains a significant challenge. This paper presents a multimodal explainability module…
Human-Robot collaboration in home and industrial workspaces is on the rise. However, the communication between robots and humans is a bottleneck. Although people use a combination of different types of gestures to complement speech, only a…
Understanding the intentions of robots is essential for natural and seamless human-robot collaboration. Ensuring that robots have means for non-verbal communication is a basis for intuitive and implicit interaction. For this, we contribute…
Speakers build rapport in the process of aligning conversational behaviors with each other. Rapport engendered with a teachable agent while instructing domain material has been shown to promote learning. Past work on lexical alignment in…
Ambiguity and noise in natural language instructions create a significant barrier towards adopting autonomous systems into safety critical workflows involving humans and machines. In this paper, we propose to build on recent advances in…
In human-robot interactions, human and robot agents maintain internal mental models of their environment, their shared task, and each other. The accuracy of these representations depends on each agent's ability to perform theory of mind,…
Autonomous robots and drones will work collaboratively and cooperatively in tomorrow's industry and agriculture. Before this becomes a reality, some form of standardised communication between man and machine must be established that…
As the first robotic platforms slowly approach our everyday life, we can imagine a near future where service robots will be easily accessible by non-expert users through vocal interfaces. The capability of managing natural language would…
We introduce BusyBoard, a toy-inspired robot learning environment that leverages a diverse set of articulated objects and inter-object functional relations to provide rich visual feedback for robot interactions. Based on this environment,…
Beyond mere formality, small talk plays a pivotal role in social dynamics, serving as a verbal handshake for building rapport and understanding. For conversational AI and social robots, the ability to engage in small talk enhances their…
With the rapid advance of sophisticated control algorithms, the capabilities of drones to stabilise, fly and manoeuvre autonomously have dramatically improved, enabling us to pay greater attention to entire missions and the interaction of a…
Purpose of Review: To effectively synthesise and analyse multi-robot behaviour, we require formal task-level models which accurately capture multi-robot execution. In this paper, we review modelling formalisms for multi-robot systems under…
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…
In the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), many researchers study shared control systems. Shared control is when a person and agent both contribute to the performance of a task in a collaborative way, often by providing control inputs…
Reasoning and planning for mobile robots is a challenging problem, as the world evolves over time and thus the robot's goals may change. One technique to tackle this problem is goal reasoning, where the agent not only reasons about its…
In this paper, we outline the vision of chatbots that facilitate the interaction between citizens and policy-makers at the city scale. We report the results of a co-design session attended by more than 60 participants. We give an outlook of…
Chatbots are conversational software applications designed to interact dialectically with users for a plethora of different purposes. Surprisingly, these colloquial agents have only recently been coupled with computational models of…
Recent work in open-domain conversational agents has demonstrated that significant improvements in model engagingness and humanness metrics can be achieved via massive scaling in both pre-training data and model size (Adiwardana et al.,…