Related papers: Read the Room: Adapting a Robot's Voice to Ambient…
While general object recognition is still far from being solved, this paper proposes a way for a robot to recognize every object at an almost human-level accuracy. Our key observation is that many robots will stay in a relatively closed…
As humans, we hear sound every second of our life. The sound we hear is often affected by the acoustics of the environment surrounding us. For example, a spacious hall leads to more reverberation. Room Impulse Responses (RIR) are commonly…
This study explores the significance of robot hearing systems, emphasizing their importance for robots operating in diverse and uncertain environments. It introduces the hardware design principles using robotaxis as an example, where…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in real-world settings need to handle imperfect audio, often degraded by hardware limitations or environmental noise, while accommodating diverse user groups. In human-robot interaction (HRI),…
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…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
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…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
Robots often need to convey information to human users. For example, robots can leverage visual, auditory, and haptic interfaces to display their intent or express their internal state. In some scenarios there are socially agreed upon…
Recent years have seen an increasing number of applications that have a natural language interface, either in the form of chatbots or via personal assistants such as Alexa (Amazon), Google Assistant, Siri (Apple), and Cortana (Microsoft).…
Explanations constitute an important aspect of successful human robot interactions and can enhance robot understanding. To improve the understanding of the robot, we have developed four levels of explanation (LOE) based on two questions:…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
The speed and accuracy with which robots are able to interpret natural language is fundamental to realizing effective human-robot interaction. A great deal of attention has been paid to developing models and approximate inference algorithms…
To enhance human-robot social interaction, it is essential for robots to process multiple social cues in a complex real-world environment. However, incongruency of input information across modalities is inevitable and could be challenging…
Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone…
For robots to seamlessly interact with humans, we first need to make sure that humans and robots understand one another. Diverse algorithms have been developed to enable robots to learn from humans (i.e., transferring information from…
We explore the use of inner speech as a mechanism to enhance transparency and trust in social robots for dietary advice. In humans, inner speech structures thought processes and decision-making; in robotics, it improves explainability by…
This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of…
Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process which refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argue that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system, which simulates human inner…
Integrating generative AI such as Large Language Models into social robots has improved their ability to engage in natural, human-like communication. This study presents a method to examine their persuasive capabilities. We designed an…