Related papers: Alfie: An Interactive Robot with a Moral Compass
As robotic products become more integrated into daily life, there is a greater need to understand authentic and real-world human-robot interactions to inform product design. Across many domestic, educational, and public settings, robots…
Integrating multimodal foundation models has significantly enhanced autonomous agents' language comprehension, perception, and planning capabilities. However, while existing works adopt a \emph{task-centric} approach with minimal human…
Artificial intelligence is seen as increasingly important, and potentially profoundly so, but the fields of AI ethics and AI engineering have not fully recognized that these technologies, including large language models (LLMs), will have…
How should a companion robot behave? In this research, we present a cognitive architecture based on a tailored personality model to investigate the impact of robotic personalities on the perception of companion robots. Drawing from existing…
The representation of the knowledge needed by a robot to perform complex tasks is restricted by the limitations of perception. One possible way of overcoming this situation and designing "knowledgeable" robots is to rely on the interaction…
Equipping humanoid robots with the capability to understand emotional states of human interactants and express emotions appropriately according to situations is essential for affective human-robot interaction. However, enabling current…
As artificial intelligence systems become increasingly agentic, capable of general reasoning, planning, and value prioritization, current safety practices that treat obedience as a proxy for ethical behavior are becoming inadequate. This…
This paper presents our first attempt to integrate user modeling features in social and affective robots. We propose a cloud-based architecture for modeling the user-robot interaction in order to re-use the approach with different kind of…
With the rising applications of robots in unstructured real-world environments, roboticists are increasingly concerned with the problems posed by the complexity of such environments. One solution to these problems is robot autonomy. Since…
Artificial intelligence (AI) is advancing at a pace that raises urgent questions about how to align machine decision-making with human moral values. This working paper investigates how leading AI systems prioritize moral outcomes and what…
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a rapidly growing field that encompasses social and industrial applications. Machine learning plays a vital role in industrial HRI by enhancing the adaptability and autonomy of robots in complex…
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…
As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms society, developers and policymakers struggle to anticipate which applications will face public moral resistance. We propose that these judgments are not idiosyncratic but systematic and…
Rapid advancements in foundation models, including Large Language Models, Vision-Language Models, Multimodal Large Language Models, and Vision-Language-Action Models, have opened new avenues for embodied AI in mobile service robotics. By…
The recent rapid advancements in artificial intelligence research and deployment have sparked more discussion about the potential ramifications of socially- and emotionally-intelligent AI. The question is not if research can produce such…
With the rise of individual and collaborative networks of autonomous agents, AI is deployed in more key reasoning and decision-making roles. For this reason, ethics-based audits play a pivotal role in the rapidly growing fields of AI safety…
In our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex, personalized, adaptive interactions with our peers. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and…
Adoption and deployment of robotic and autonomous systems in industry are currently hindered by the lack of transparency, required for safety and accountability. Methods for providing explanations are needed that are agnostic to the…
The ability to interact with machines using natural human language is becoming not just commonplace, but expected. The next step is not just text interfaces, but speech interfaces and not just with computers, but with all machines including…
This perspective reframes human-robot interaction (HRI) through extended reality (XR), arguing that virtual robots powered by large foundation models (FMs) can serve as cognitively grounded, empathic agents. Unlike physical robots,…