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Successful human-robot collaboration depends on cohesive communication and a precise understanding of the robot's abilities, goals, and constraints. While robotic manipulators offer high precision, versatility, and productivity, they…
In social robotics, endowing humanoid robots with the ability to generate bodily expressions of affect can improve human-robot interaction and collaboration, since humans attribute, and perhaps subconsciously anticipate, such traces to…
Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants to…
In this paper we present an open source educational robot, designed both to engage children in an affective and social interaction, and to be programmable also in its social and affective behaviour. Indeed the robot, in addition to classic…
We present a real-time algorithm for emotion-aware navigation of a robot among pedestrians. Our approach estimates time-varying emotional behaviors of pedestrians from their faces and trajectories using a combination of Bayesian-inference,…
Our goal is to enable robots to \emph{time} their motion in a way that is purposefully expressive of their internal states, making them more transparent to people. We start by investigating what types of states motion timing is capable of…
As robots become increasingly prominent in diverse industrial settings, the desire for an accessible and reliable system has correspondingly increased. Yet, the task of meaningfully assessing the feasibility of introducing a new robotic…
As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through…
Mapping discrete and dimensional models of emotion remains a persistent challenge in affective science and computing. This incompatibility hinders the combination of valuable data sets, creating a significant bottleneck for training robust…
One effective approach for equipping artificial agents with sensorimotor skills is to use self-exploration. To do this efficiently is critical, as time and data collection are costly. In this study, we propose an exploration mechanism that…
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators' experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate…
Zoomorphic robots have the potential to offer companionship and well-being as accessible, low-maintenance alternatives to pet ownership. Many such robots, however, feature limited emotional expression, restricting their potential for rich…
In humans, intrinsic motivation is an important mechanism for open-ended cognitive development; in robots, it has been shown to be valuable for exploration. An important aspect of human cognitive development is $\textit{episodic memory}$…
Robots learn as they interact with humans. Consider a human teleoperating an assistive robot arm: as the human guides and corrects the arm's motion, the robot gathers information about the human's desired task. But how does the human know…
Social robots need to understand the affective state of the humans with whom they interact. Successful interactions require understanding mood and emotion in the short term, and personality and attitudes over longer periods. Social robots…
Text-writing robots have been used in assistive writing and drawing applications. However, robots do not convey emotional tones in the writing process due to the lack of behaviors humans typically adopt. To examine how people interpret…
This paper introduces a framework, called EMOTION, for generating expressive motion sequences in humanoid robots, enhancing their ability to engage in humanlike non-verbal communication. Non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, gestures,…
The purpose of the present study is to learn emotion expression representations for artificial agents using reward shaping mechanisms. The approach takes inspiration from the TAMER framework for training a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to…
This article suggests a reasoning-guided vision-language-motion diffusion framework (RG-VLMD) for generating instruction-aware co-speech gestures for humanoid robots in educational scenarios. The system integrates multi-modal affective…
Motivated by the intuitive understanding humans have about the space of possible interactions, and the ease with which they can generalize this understanding to previously unseen scenes, we develop an approach for learning visual…