Related papers: Exploring Consequential Robot Sound: Should We Mak…
The Japanese notion of "kawaii" or expressions of cuteness, vulnerability, and/or charm is a global cultural export. Work has explored kawaii-ness as a design feature and factor of user experience in the visual appearance, nonverbal…
Trust has been shown to be a key factor in effective human-robot collaboration. In the context of assistive robotics, the effect of trust factors on human experience is further pronounced. Personalization of assistive robots is an…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC), effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder…
The development of assistive robots for social collaboration raises critical questions about responsible and inclusive design, especially when interacting with individuals from protected groups such as those with disabilities or advanced…
Small talk can foster rapport building in human-human teamwork; yet how non-anthropomorphic robots, such as collaborative manipulators commonly used in industry, may capitalize on these social communications remains unclear. This work…
Recent advancements in quadruped robot research have significantly improved their ability to traverse complex and unstructured outdoor environments. However, the issue of noise generated during locomotion is generally overlooked, which is…
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…
In human-robot interaction (HRI), we study how humans interact with robots, but also the effects of robot behavior on human perception and well-being. Especially, the influence on humans by tandem robots with one human controlled and one…
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important aspect of effective human-robot collaboration and received a lot of attention from the research community. For example, many neural network-based architectures were proposed recently and…
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…
Profanity is nearly as old as language itself, and cursing has become particularly ubiquitous within the last century. At the same time, robots in personal and service applications are often overly polite, even though past work demonstrates…
Mobile robots joining public spaces like sidewalks must care for pedestrian comfort. Many studies consider pedestrians' objective safety, for example, by developing collision avoidance algorithms, but not enough studies take the…
A command-following robot that serves people in everyday life must continually improve itself in deployment domains with minimal help from its end users, instead of engineers. Previous methods are either difficult to continuously improve…
This study with 40 high-school students demonstrates the high influence of a social educational robot on students' decision-making for a set of eight true-false questions on electric circuits, for which the theory had been covered in the…
Can social power endow social robots with the capacity to persuade? This paper represents our recent endeavor to design persuasive social robots. We have designed and run three different user studies to investigate the effectiveness of…
It is intractable for assistive robots to have all functionalities pre-programmed prior to deployment. Rather, it is more realistic for robots to perform supplemental, on-site learning about user's needs and preferences, and particularities…
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…
We often assume that robots which collaborate with humans should behave in ways that are transparent (e.g., legible, explainable). These transparent robots intentionally choose actions that convey their internal state to nearby humans: for…
Understanding human perceptions of robot performance is crucial for designing socially intelligent robots that can adapt to human expectations. Current approaches often rely on surveys, which can disrupt ongoing human-robot interactions. As…
While the use of social robots for language teaching has been explored, there remains limited work on a task-specific synthesized voices for language teaching robots. Given that language is a verbal task, this gap may have severe…