Related papers: Whither the Priors for (Vocal) Interactivity?
One of the long-term challenges of robotics is to enable robots to interact with humans in the visual world via natural language, as humans are visual animals that communicate through language. Overcoming this challenge requires the ability…
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational…
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…
Large language models have given social robots the ability to autonomously engage in open-domain conversations. However, they are still missing a fundamental social skill: making use of the multiple modalities that carry social…
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder find robots easier to communicate with than humans. Thus, robots have been introduced in autism therapies. However, due to the environmental complexity, the used robots often have to be controlled…
In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid human-robot…
Large-language models (LLMs) hold significant promise in improving human-robot interaction, offering advanced conversational skills and versatility in managing diverse, open-ended user requests in various tasks and domains. Despite the…
Many of us researchers take extra measures to control for known-unknowns. However, unknown-unknowns can, at best, be negligible, but otherwise, they could produce unreliable data that might have dire consequences in real-life downstream…
Modern language models, while sophisticated, exhibit some inherent shortcomings, particularly in conversational settings. We claim that many of the observed shortcomings can be attributed to violation of one or more conversational…
Voice is an essential modality for human-robot interaction (HRI). The way a robot sounds plays a central role in shaping how humans perceive and engage with it, influencing factors such as intelligibility, understandability, and likability.…
Collaborative robots must quickly adapt to their partner's intent and preferences to proactively identify helpful actions. This is especially true in situated settings where human partners can continually teach robots new high-level…
In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic…
Human spoken language has long been the subject of scientific investigation, particularly with regard to the mechanisms underpinning speech production. Likewise, the study of animal communications has a substantial literature, with many…
The use of natural language and voice-based interfaces gradu-ally transforms how consumers search, shop, and express their preferences. The current work explores how changes in the syntactical structure of the interaction with…
Language-conditioned robot manipulation is an emerging field aimed at enabling seamless communication and cooperation between humans and robotic agents by teaching robots to comprehend and execute instructions conveyed in natural language.…
While we do not always use words, communicating what we want to an AI is a conversation -- with ourselves as well as with it, a recurring loop with optional steps depending on the complexity of the situation and our request. Any given…
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…
When a robot performs a task next to a human, physical interaction is inevitable: the human might push, pull, twist, or guide the robot. The state-of-the-art treats these interactions as disturbances that the robot should reject or avoid.…
As human-robot collaboration is becoming more widespread, there is a need for a more natural way of communicating with the robot. This includes combining data from several modalities together with the context of the situation and background…
This paper presents an overview of robot failure detection work from HRI and adjacent fields using failures as an opportunity to examine robot explanation behaviours. As humanoid robots remain experimental tools in the early 2020s,…