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This research report explores the role of eye gaze in human-robot interactions and proposes a learning system for detecting objects gazed at by humans using solely visual feedback. The system leverages face detection, human attention…

Gaze cueing is a fundamental part of social interactions, and broadly studied using Posner task based gaze cueing paradigms. While studies using human stimuli consistently yield a gaze cueing effect, results from studies using robotic…

Robots are required to autonomously respond to changing situations. Imitation learning is a promising candidate for achieving generalization performance, and extensive results have been demonstrated in object manipulation. However,…

Gaze is a crucial social cue in any interacting scenario and drives many mechanisms of social cognition (joint and shared attention, predicting human intention, coordination tasks). Gaze direction is an indication of social and emotional…

This study uses multisensory data (i.e., color and depth) to recognize human actions in the context of multimodal human-robot interaction. Here we employed the iCub robot to observe the predefined actions of the human partners by using four…

Predicting other people's action is key to successful social interactions, enabling us to adjust our own behavior to the consequence of the others' future actions. Studies on action recognition have focused on the importance of individual…

This work proposes a biologically inspired approach that focuses on attention systems that are able to inhibit or constrain what is relevant at any one moment. We propose a radically new approach to making progress in human-robot joint…

Human interaction involves very sophisticated non-verbal communication skills like understanding the goals and actions of others and coordinating our own actions accordingly. Neuroscience refers to this mechanism as motor resonance, in the…

For successful deployment of robots in multifaceted situations, an understanding of the robot for its environment is indispensable. With advancing performance of state-of-the-art object detectors, the capability of robots to detect objects…

In our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex, personalized, adaptive interactions with our peers. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and…

As humans, we have a remarkable capacity for reading the characteristics of objects only by observing how another person carries them. Indeed, how we perform our actions naturally embeds information on the item features. Collaborative…

Humans have the fascinating capacity of processing non-verbal visual cues to understand and anticipate the actions of other humans. This "intention reading" ability is underpinned by shared motor-repertoires and action-models, which we use…

A growing field in robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research is human-robot collaboration, whose target is to enable effective teamwork between humans and robots. However, in many situations human teams are still superior to…

The study of human-robot interaction is fundamental to the design and use of robotics in real-world applications. Robots will need to predict and adapt to the actions of human collaborators in order to achieve good performance and improve…

This paper explores the estimation of user attention in the setting of a cooperative handheld robot: a robot designed to behave as a handheld tool but that has levels of task knowledge. We use a tool-mounted gaze tracking system, which,…

In human-robot collaboration, robot errors are inevitable -- damaging user trust, willingness to work together, and task performance. Prior work has shown that people naturally respond to robot errors socially and that in social…

It is important for socially assistive robots to be able to recognize when a user needs and wants help. Such robots need to be able to recognize human needs in a real-time manner so that they can provide timely assistance. We propose an…

A key challenge in human-robot interaction research lies in developing robotic systems that can effectively perceive and interpret social cues, facilitating natural and adaptive interactions. In this work, we present a novel framework for…

Collaborative robots (cobots) are widely used in industrial applications, yet extensive research is still needed to enhance human-robot collaborations and operator experience. A potential approach to improve the collaboration experience…

Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…