Related papers: Alfie: An Interactive Robot with a Moral Compass
The number of robots deployed in our daily surroundings is ever-increasing. Even in the industrial set-up, the use of coworker robots is increasing rapidly. These cohabitant robots perform various tasks as instructed by co-located human…
In this paper, we place ourselves in the context of human robot interaction and address the problem of cognitive robot modelling. More precisely we are investigating properties of a utility-based model that will govern a robot's actions.…
Effective communication is essential in collaborative tasks, so AI-equipped robots working alongside humans need to be able to explain their behaviour in order to cooperate effectively and earn trust. We analyse and classify communications…
Intelligent systems are increasingly part of our everyday lives and have been integrated seamlessly to the point where it is difficult to imagine a world without them. Physical manifestations of those systems on the other hand, in the form…
It is important for socially assistive robots to be able to recognize when a user needs and wants help. Such robots need to be able to recognize human needs in a real-time manner so that they can provide timely assistance. We propose an…
This paper presents our recent research on integrating artificial emotional intelligence in a social robot (Ryan) and studies the robot's effectiveness in engaging older adults. Ryan is a socially assistive robot designed to provide…
The addressee estimation (understanding to whom somebody is talking) is a fundamental task for human activity recognition in multi-party conversation scenarios. Specifically, in the field of human-robot interaction, it becomes even more…
We envision robots that can collaborate and communicate seamlessly with humans. It is necessary for such robots to decide both what to say and how to act, while interacting with humans. To this end, we introduce a new task, dialogue object…
AI Alignment research seeks to align human and AI goals to ensure independent actions by a machine are always ethical. This paper argues empathy is necessary for this task, despite being often neglected in favor of more deductive…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
Big models have greatly advanced AI's ability to understand, generate, and manipulate information and content, enabling numerous applications. However, as these models become increasingly integrated into everyday life, their inherent…
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled conversational robots to move beyond constrained dialogue toward free-form interaction. However, without context-specific adaptation, generic LLM outputs can be ineffective or inappropriate. This…
Whenever humans and robots work together, it is essential that unexpected robot behavior can be explained to the user. Especially in applications such as shared control the user and the robot must share the same model of the objects in the…
Being able to recognize emotions in human users is considered a highly desirable trait in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. However, most contemporary approaches rarely attempt to apply recognized emotional features in an active…
Robots can support humans in tedious tasks, as well as provide social support. However, the decision-making and behavior of robots is not always clear to the human interaction partner. In this work, we discuss the opportunity of using…
Robots can learn from humans by asking questions. In these questions the robot demonstrates a few different behaviors and asks the human for their favorite. But how should robots choose which questions to ask? Today's robots optimize for…
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators' experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate…
Social robots aim to establish long-term bonds with humans through engaging conversation. However, traditional conversational approaches, reliant on scripted interactions, often fall short in maintaining engaging conversations. This paper…
A service robot can provide a smoother interaction experience if it has the ability to proactively detect whether a nearby user intends to interact, in order to adapt its behavior e.g. by explicitly showing that it is available to provide a…
Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…