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Humanoid social robots are increasingly present in daily life, making sustained user engagement a critical factor for their effectiveness and acceptance. While prior work has often examined affective evaluations or anthropomorphic design,…
Human acceptance of social robots is greatly effected by empathy and perceived understanding. This necessitates accurate and flexible responses to various input data from the user. While systems such as this can become increasingly complex…
We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of…
The emergence of pretrained large language models has led to the deployment of a range of social chatbots for chitchat. Although these chatbots demonstrate language ability and fluency, they are not guaranteed to be engaging and can…
For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…
Social robots are increasingly introduced into children's lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the "unboxing" phenomenon in…
Public perceptions of Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (RAI) are important in the acceptance, uptake, government regulation and research funding of this technology. Recent research has shown that the public's understanding of RAI can be…
In this paper, we present an approach for robot learning of social affordance from human activity videos. We consider the problem in the context of human-robot interaction: Our approach learns structural representations of human-human (and…
Despite the rising interest in chatbots, deployment has been slow in the retail sector. In the absence of comparative cross sector research on the user acceptance of chatbots in retail, we present a model and a research framework that…
While interacting with another person, our reactions and behavior are much affected by the emotional changes within the temporal context of the interaction. Our intrinsic affective appraisal comprising perception, self-assessment, and the…
Driven by ongoing improvements in machine learning, chatbots have increasingly grown from experimental interface prototypes to reliable and robust tools for process automation. Building on these advances, companies have identified various…
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…
Recognition of intentions is a subconscious cognitive process vital to human communication. This skill enables anticipation and increases the quality of interactions between humans. Within the context of engagement, non-verbal signals are…
Since the late 1990s when speech companies began providing their customer-service software in the market, people have gotten used to speaking to machines. As people interact more often with voice and gesture controlled machines, they expect…
To obtain advanced interaction between autonomous robots and users, robots should be able to distinguish their state space representations (i.e., world models). Herein, a novel method was proposed for estimating the user's world model based…
An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow…
The use of social robots as instruments for social mediation has been gaining traction in the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). So far, the design of such robots and their behaviors is often driven by technological platforms and…
In this paper we introduce a novel approach that enables users to interact with a mobile robot in a natural manner. The proposed interaction system does not require any specific infrastructure or device, but relies on commonly utilized…
Feedback design is an important aspect of person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centred design approach to ensure the design is focused on the needs and preferences of the users. A sequence of user studies…
Robot Learning from Demonstration (RLfD) is a technique for robots to derive policies from instructors' examples. Although the reciprocal effects of student engagement on teacher behavior are widely recognized in the educational community,…