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Our project aims at supporting the creation of sustainable and meaningful longer-term human-robot relationships through the creation of embodied robots with face recognition and natural language dialogue capabilities, which exploit and…
Human collaboration with robotics is dependant on the development of a relationship between human and robot, without which performance and utilization can decrease. Emotion and personality conveyance has been shown to enhance robotic…
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,…
Hugs are complex affective interactions that often include gestures like squeezes. We present six new guidelines for designing interactive hugging robots, which we validate through two studies with our custom robot. To achieve autonomy, we…
While Machine learning gives rise to astonishing results in automated systems, it is usually at the cost of large data requirements. This makes many successful algorithms from machine learning unsuitable for human-machine interaction, where…
The growing development of robots with artificial emotional expressiveness raises important questions about their persuasive potential in children's behavior. While research highlights the pragmatic value of emotional expressiveness in…
Dialog systems are often designed or trained to output human-like responses. However, some responses may be impossible for a machine to truthfully say (e.g. "that movie made me cry"). Highly anthropomorphic responses might make users…
This paper describes our research on AI agents embodied in visual, virtual or physical forms, enabling them to interact with both users and their environments. These agents, which include virtual avatars, wearable devices, and robots, are…
We study the problem of designing AI agents that can robustly cooperate with people in human-machine partnerships. Our work is inspired by real-life scenarios in which an AI agent, e.g., a virtual assistant, has to cooperate with new users…
We present dialogue management routines for a system to engage in multiparty agent-infant interaction. The ultimate purpose of this research is to help infants learn a visual sign language by engaging them in naturalistic and socially…
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…
When people try to influence others to do something, they subconsciously adjust their speech to include appropriate emotional information. In order for a robot to influence people in the same way, the robot should be able to imitate the…
This article proposes an emotive lifelike robotic face, called ExpressionBot, that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural…
Building a socially intelligent agent involves many challenges, one of which is to teach the agent to speak guided by its value like a human. However, value-driven chatbots are still understudied in the area of dialogue systems. Most…
It may be difficult for some individuals to open up and share their thoughts and feelings in front of a mental health expert. For those who are more at ease with a virtual agent, conversational agents can serve as an intermediate step in…
Despite living in an increasingly connected world, social isolation is a prevalent issue today. While social robots have been explored as tools to enhance social connection through companionship, their potential as asynchronous social…
Learning predictive models from interaction with the world allows an agent, such as a robot, to learn about how the world works, and then use this learned model to plan coordinated sequences of actions to bring about desired outcomes.…
As robots and artificial agents become increasingly integrated into daily life, enhancing their ability to interact with humans is essential. Emotions, which play a crucial role in human interactions, can improve the naturalness and…
We propose AToM-Bot, a novel task generation and execution framework for proactive robot-human interaction, which leverages the human mental and physical state inference capabilities of the Vision Language Model (VLM) prompted by the…
The increase in available computing power and the Deep Learning revolution have allowed the exploration of new topics and frontiers in Artificial Intelligence research. A new field called Embodied Artificial Intelligence, which places at…