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We introduce the conceptual formulation, design, fabrication, control and commercial translation with IoT connection of a hybrid-face social robot and validation of human emotional response to its affective interactions. The hybrid-face…
As robots are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios, a key question is how to best transfer knowledge learned in one environment to another, where shifting constraints and human preferences render adaptation challenging. A central…
Robots can learn preferences from human demonstrations, but their success depends on how informative these demonstrations are. Being informative is unfortunately very challenging, because during teaching, people typically get no…
Detection of engagement during a conversation is an important function of human-robot interaction. The level of user engagement can influence the dialogue strategy of the robot. Our motivation in this work is to detect several behaviors…
AI companion chatbots, such as those offered by Replika and CharacterAI, increasingly function as always-available companions that provide empathy, validation, and support. While these systems appear to meet basic needs for connection,…
Mirroring non-verbal social cues such as affect or movement can enhance human-human and human-robot interactions in the real world. The robotic platforms and control methods also impact people's perception of human-robot interaction.…
User engagement, cognitive participation, and motivation during task execution in physical human-robot interaction are crucial for motor learning. These factors are especially important in contexts like robotic rehabilitation, where…
Co-speech gestures play a crucial role in the interactions between humans and embodied conversational agents (ECA). Recent deep learning methods enable the generation of realistic, natural co-speech gestures synchronized with speech, but…
Interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) based agents can positively influence human behavior and judgment. However, studies to date focus on text-based conversational agents (CA) with limited embodiment, restricting our understanding…
This paper presents an empirical investigation of the extent to which spoken Humanoid Embodied Conversational Agents (HECAs) can foster usability in mobile serious game (MSG) applications. The aim of the research is to assess the impact of…
Rapport plays an important role during communication because it can help people understand each other's feelings or ideas and leads to a smooth communication. Computational rapport model has been proposed based on theory in previous work.…
In order to create effective storytelling agents three fundamental questions must be answered: first, is a physically embodied agent preferable to a virtual agent or a voice-only narration? Second, does a human voice have an advantage over…
When we go for a walk with friends, we can observe an interesting effect: From step lengths to arm movements - our movements unconsciously align; they synchronize. Prior research found that this synchronization is a crucial aspect of human…
A single mobile service robot may generate hundreds of encounters with pedestrians, yet there is little published data on the factors influencing these incidental human-robot encounters. We report the results of a between-subjects…
Strategies are necessary to mitigate the impact of unexpected behavior in collaborative robotics, and research to develop solutions is lacking. Our aim here was to explore the benefits of an affective interaction, as opposed to a more…
Recognition of social signals, from human facial expressions or prosody of speech, is a popular research topic in human-robot interaction studies. There is also a long line of research in the spoken dialogue community that investigates user…
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…
Social communication between people and social robots has been studied extensively and found to have various notable benefits, including the enhancement of human-robot team cohesion and the development of rapport and trust. However, the…
We present a new framework called KorraAI for conceiving and building embodied conversational agents (ECAs). Our framework models ECAs' behavior considering contextual information, for example, about environment and interaction time, and…
Increasing anthropomorphic robot behavioral design could affect trust and cooperation positively. However, studies have shown contradicting results and suggest a task-dependent relationship between robots that display emotions and trust.…