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While there are many examples in which robots provide social assistance, a lack of theory on how the robots should decide how to assist impedes progress in realizing these technologies. To address this deficiency, we propose a pair of…
Children and adults with cerebral palsy (CP) can have involuntary upper limb movements as a consequence of the symptoms that characterize their motor disability, leading to difficulties in communicating with caretakers and peers. We…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
Social assistive robots are starting to be widely used in pediatric health-care environments with the aim of distracting and entertaining children, and so of reducing a possible state of anxiety. In this paper, we present some initial…
As robots and other intelligent agents move from simple environments and problems to more complex, unstructured settings, manually programming their behavior has become increasingly challenging and expensive. Often, it is easier for a…
Social robots, also known as service or assistant robots, have been developed to improve the quality of human life in recent years. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a special type of social robots that focus on providing support through…
With advances in artificial intelligence, research is increasingly exploring the potential functions that social robots can play in education. As teachers are a critical stakeholder in the use and application of educational technologies, we…
Institutional and social barriers in higher education often prevent students with disabilities from effectively accessing support, including lengthy procedures, insufficient information, and high social-emotional demands. This study…
The foundation of this paper is an experiment of fifteen participants interacting directly with an autonomous robot. The task for the participants was to carry a table, in two different setups, together with a robot, which is intended to…
The diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in children is commonly accompanied by a diagnosis of sensory processing disorders as well. Abnormalities are usually reported in multiple sensory processing domains, showing a higher…
The coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic affected our lives deeply, just like everyone else, the children also suffered from the restrictions due to COVID-19 affecting their education and social interactions with others, being restricted…
Family-school partnerships (FSP) are critical to children's development, yet families often face barriers such as time constraints, fragmented communication, and limited opportunities for meaningful engagement. As a step toward facilitating…
Robot Learning from Demonstration (RLfD) is a technique for robots to derive policies from instructors' examples. Although the reciprocal effects of student engagement on teacher behavior are widely recognized in the educational community,…
This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of…
The role of robots is expanding from tool to collaborator. Socially assistive robots (SARs) are an example of collaborative robots that assist humans in the real world. As robots enter our social sphere, unforeseen risks occur during…
There is a lack of autonomy on traditional Robot-Assisted Therapy systems interacting with children with autism. To overcome this limitation a supervised autonomous robot controller is being built. In this paper we present a multilayer…
Performing joint interaction requires constant mutual monitoring of own actions and their effects on the other's behaviour. Such an action-effect monitoring is boosted by social cues and might result in an increasing sense of agency. Joint…
This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to…
Previous work has observed how Neurodivergence is often harmfully pathologized in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Human-Robot interaction (HRI) research. We conduct a review of autism robot reviews and find the dominant research…
Artificial agents, particularly humanoid robots, interact with their environment, objects, and people using cameras, actuators, and physical presence. Their communication methods are often pre-programmed, limiting their actions and…