Related papers: Using Socially Expressive Mixed Reality Arms for E…
Touch is a fundamental aspect of emotion-rich communication, playing a vital role in human interaction and offering significant potential in human-robot interaction. Previous research has demonstrated that a sparse representation of human…
Socially assistive robots could help to support people's well-being in contexts such as art therapy where human therapists are scarce, by making art such as paintings together with people in a way that is emotionally contingent and…
This work explores how force feedback affects various aspects of robot data collection within the Extended Reality (XR) setting. Force feedback has been proved to enhance the user experience in Extended Reality (XR) by providing…
There is a growing need to deliver rehabilitation care to patients remotely. Long term demographic changes, geographic shortages of care providers, and now a global pandemic contribute to this need. Telepresence provides an option for…
Our research explores the potential of a humanoid robot for work in unpredictable environments, but controlling a humanoid robot remains a very difficult problem. In our previous work, we designed a prototype virtual reality (VR) interface…
Bimanual object manipulation involves multiple visuo-haptic sensory feedbacks arising from the interaction with the environment that are managed from the central nervous system and consequently translated in motor commands. Kinematic…
We present data from two online human-robot interaction experiments where 227 participants viewed videos of a humanoid robot exhibiting faulty or non-faulty behaviours while either remaining mute or speaking. The participants were asked to…
This paper describes an experimental evaluation aimed at detecting the users' perception of the robot's empathic abilities during a conversation. The results have been then analyzed to search for a possible relationship between the…
Social robots need to understand the affective state of the humans with whom they interact. Successful interactions require understanding mood and emotion in the short term, and personality and attitudes over longer periods. Social robots…
The creation of virtual humans increasingly leverages automated synthesis of speech and gestures, enabling expressive, adaptable agents that effectively engage users. However, the independent development of voice and gesture generation…
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…
Can we enable humanoid robots to generate rich, diverse, and expressive motions in the real world? We propose to learn a whole-body control policy on a human-sized robot to mimic human motions as realistic as possible. To train such a…
Millions of people have seen their daily habits transform, reducing physical activity and leading to mental health issues. This study explores how virtual characters impact motivation for well-being. Three prototypes with cartoon, robotic,…
In social robotics, endowing humanoid robots with the ability to generate bodily expressions of affect can improve human-robot interaction and collaboration, since humans attribute, and perhaps subconsciously anticipate, such traces to…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. The design of socially capable and intelligent robots can vary, depending on the target user groups. In this…
Industrial arms need to evolve beyond their standard shape to embrace new and emerging technologies. In this paper, we shall first perform an analysis of four popular but different modern industrial robot arms. By seeing the common trends…
Affective touch offers positive psychological and physiological benefits such as the mitigation of stress and pain. If a robot could realize human-like affective touch, it would open up new application areas, including supporting care work.…
With the advancement of conversational AI, research on bodily expressions, including gestures and facial expressions, has also progressed. However, many existing studies focus on photorealistic avatars, making them unsuitable for…
Researching novel user experiences in medicine is challenging due to limited access to equipment and strict ethical protocols. Extended Reality (XR) simulation technologies offer a cost- and time-efficient solution for developing…
It is challenging for humans -- particularly those living with physical disabilities -- to control high-dimensional, dexterous robots. Prior work explores learning embedding functions that map a human's low-dimensional inputs (e.g., via a…