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Interactive storytelling is vital for preschooler development. While children's interactive partners have traditionally been their parents and teachers, recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) have sparked a surge of AI-based…
We present and evaluate a prototype social robot to encourage daily exercise among older adults in a home setting. Our prototype system, designed to lead users through exercise sessions with motivational feedback, was assessed through a…
Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The DREAM project explores how to deliver effective RAT interventions to ASD children within a…
When children are anxious or scared, it can be hard for them to stay still or follow instructions during medical procedures, making the process more challenging and affecting procedure results. This is particularly true for radiological…
Persuasive social robots employ their social influence to modulate children's behaviours in child-robot interaction. In this work, we introduce the Child-Robot Relational Norm Intervention (CRNI) model, leveraging the passive role of social…
In this work we tackle the problem of child engagement estimation while children freely interact with a robot in their room. We propose a deep-based multi-view solution that takes advantage of recent developments in human pose detection. We…
In peer mediation--an approach to conflict resolution used in many K-12 schools in the United States--students help other students to resolve conflicts. For schools without peer mediation programs, socially assistive robots (SARs) may be…
The past few decades has seen increased interest in the application of social robots to interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder as behavioural coaches [4]. We consider that robots embedded in therapies could also provide quantitative…
The topic of joint actions has been deeply studied in the context of Human-Human interaction in order to understand how humans cooperate. Creating autonomous robots that collaborate with humans is a complex problem, where it is relevant to…
This paper presents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a novel collaborative educational game titled "Land of Hands", involving children and a customized social robot that we designed (HakshE). Through this gaming platform, we…
An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow…
With most recent estimates giving an incidence rate of 1 in 68 children in the United States, the autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a growing public health crisis. Many of these children struggle to make eye contact, recognize facial…
This paper explores the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a tool for diagnosis, assessment, and intervention for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). It focuses particularly on AI's role in early diagnosis, utilizing…
The work presented in this paper was carried out in the context of the project Girls and boys: one day at university promoted by the City of Turin together with the University of Turin. We were responsible for two educational activities on…
In socially assistive robotics, an important research area is the development of adaptation techniques and their effect on human-robot interaction. We present a meta-learning based policy gradient method for addressing the problem of…
Skilled motor behavior is critical in many human daily life activities and professions. The design of robots that can effectively teach motor skills is an important challenge in the robotics field. In particular, it is important to…
Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate…
Recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence promise the potential to transform human-robot interaction: Explanations of robot decisions could affect user perceptions, justify their reliability, and increase trust. However,…
The increasing presence of robots alongside humans, such as in human-robot teams in manufacturing, gives rise to research questions about the kind of behaviors people prefer in their robot counterparts. We term actions that support…
This study explores how human perceptions of a non-anthropomorphic robotic manipulator are shaped by two key dimensions of behaviour: arousal, defined as the robot's movement energy and expressiveness, and attention, defined as the robot's…