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The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
Currently, most social robots interact with their surroundings and humans through sensors that are integral parts of the robots, which limits the usability of the sensors, human-robot interaction, and interchangeability. A wearable sensor…
The effectiveness of human-robot interaction often hinges on the ability to cultivate engagement - a dynamic process of cognitive involvement that supports meaningful exchanges. Many existing definitions and models of engagement are either…
Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…
BotVerse is a scalable, event-driven framework for high-fidelity social simulation using LLM-based agents. It addresses the ethical risks of studying autonomous agents on live networks by isolating interactions within a controlled…
Human-robot collaboration has benefited users with higher efficiency towards interactive tasks. Nevertheless, most collaborative schemes rely on complicated human-machine interfaces, which might lack the requisite intuitiveness compared…
Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) research is typically built around the premise that the robot serves to assist a human in achieving a human-led goal or shared task. However, there are many circumstances during HRI in which a robot may need…
This paper investigates the integration of haptic feedback and virtual reality (VR) control interfaces to enhance teleoperation and telemanipulation of underwater ROVs (remotely operated vehicles). Traditional ROV teleoperation relies on…
The proliferation of robots in public spaces necessitates a deeper understanding of how these robots can interact with those they share the space with. In this paper, we present findings from video analysis of publicly deployed cleaning…
Sharing autonomy between robots and human operators could facilitate data collection of robotic task demonstrations to continuously improve learned models. Yet, the means to communicate intent and reason about the future are disparate…
This work introduces a solution to enhance human-robot interaction over limited wireless connectivity. The goal is toenable remote control of a robot through a virtual reality (VR)interface, ensuring a smooth transition to autonomous mode…
As human-robot collaboration is becoming more widespread, there is a need for a more natural way of communicating with the robot. This includes combining data from several modalities together with the context of the situation and background…
Memory is fundamental to social interaction, enabling humans to recall meaningful past experiences and adapt their behavior accordingly based on the context. However, most current social robots and embodied agents rely on non-selective,…
Social robots (SRs) should autonomously interact with humans, while exhibiting proper social behaviors associated to their role. By contributing to health-care, education, and companionship, SRs will enhance life quality. However,…
The past few years have seen rapid progress in the development of service robots. Universities and companies alike have launched major research efforts toward the deployment of ambitious systems designed to aid human operators performing a…
Reliable contact simulation plays a key role in the development of (semi-)autonomous robots, especially when dealing with contact-rich manipulation scenarios, an active robotics research topic. Besides simulation, components such as…
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…
Using head-mounted Virtual Reality (VR) displays to simulate driving is critical to studying driving behavior and designing driver assistance systems. But existing VR driving simulators are often limited to tracking only eye movements. The…
Linguistic ambiguity is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Previous works adopted interaction between robots and humans for language disambiguation. Nevertheless, when interactive robots are deployed in daily environments, there are significant…
In the EU-funded MuMMER project, we have developed a social robot designed to interact naturally and flexibly with users in public spaces such as a shopping mall. We present the latest version of the robot system developed during the…