Related papers: Exploring Consequential Robot Sound: Should We Mak…
Loneliness and stress are prevalent among young adults and are linked to significant psychological and health-related consequences. Social robots may offer a promising avenue for emotional support, especially when considering the ongoing…
This paper describes a between-subjects Amazon Mechanical Turk study (n = 220) that investigated how a robot's affective narrative influences its ability to elicit empathy in human observers. We first conducted a pilot study to develop and…
Users develop mental models of robots to conceptualize what kind of interactions they can have with those robots. The conceptualizations are often formed before interactions with the robot and are based only on observing the robot's…
Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…
An important factor in developing control models for human-robot collaboration is how acceptable they are to their human partners. One such method for creating acceptable control models is to attempt to mimic human-like behaviour in robots…
Older adults living alone have a number of challenges, and robots can help with some of them--by providing reminders, initiating activity, or offering comfort. As part of developing a cat robot with limited assistive functions, we designed…
While thinking aloud has been reported to positively affect problem-solving, the effects of the presence of an embodied entity (e.g., a social robot) to whom words can be directed remain mostly unexplored. In this work, we investigated the…
As robot deployments become more commonplace, people are likely to take on the role of supervising robots (i.e., correcting their mistakes) rather than directly teaching them. Prior works on Learning from Corrections (LfC) have relied on…
The paper reports an empirical study of the effect of human treatment of a robot on the social perception of the robot's behavior. The study employed an enacted interaction between an anthropomorphic "waiter" robot and two customers. The…
We propose Audio Noise Awareness using Visuals of Indoors for NAVIgation for quieter robot path planning. While humans are naturally aware of the noise they make and its impact on those around them, robots currently lack this awareness. A…
In the next decade, social robots will be implemented in many public spaces to provide services to humans. We question the properties of these social robots to afford acceptance and spontaneous emotional interactions. More specifically, in…
As social robots become more common, many have adopted cute aesthetics aiming to enhance user comfort and acceptance. However, the effect of this aesthetic choice on human feedback in reinforcement learning scenarios remains unclear.…
As human-robot collaboration opportunities continue to expand, trust becomes ever more important for full engagement and utilization of robots. Affective trust, built on emotional relationship and interpersonal bonds is particularly…
Robots come in various forms and have different characteristics that may shape the interaction with them. In human-human interactions, height is a characteristic that shapes human dynamics, with taller people typically perceived as more…
If a picture paints a thousand words, sound may voice a million. While recent robotic painting and image synthesis methods have achieved progress in generating visuals from text inputs, the translation of sound into images is vastly…
Unprecedented possibilities of quadruped robots have driven much research on the technical aspects of these robots. However, the social perception and acceptability of quadruped robots so far remain poorly understood. This work investigates…
As groups of robots increasingly collaborate with humans, understanding how humans perceive them is critical for designing effective human-robot teams. While prior research examined how humans interpret and evaluate the abilities and…
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…
Effective and fluent close-proximity human-robot interaction requires understanding how humans get habituated to robots and how robot motion affects human comfort. While prior work has identified humans' preferences over robot motion…
As mobile robots are increasingly deployed in human environments, enabling them to predict how people perceive them is critical for socially adaptable navigation. Predicting perceptions is challenging for two main reasons: (1) HRI…