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To bring robots into human everyday life, their capacity for social interaction must increase. One way for robots to acquire social skills is by assigning them the concept of identity. This research focuses on the concept of…
Humans engaged in collaborative activities are naturally able to convey their intentions to teammates through multi-modal communication, which is made up of explicit and implicit cues. Similarly, a more natural form of human-robot…
Ethics and safety research in artificial intelligence is increasingly framed in terms of "alignment" with human values and interests. I argue that Turing's call for "fair play for machines" is an early and often overlooked contribution to…
Recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence promise the potential to transform human-robot interaction: Explanations of robot decisions could affect user perceptions, justify their reliability, and increase trust. However,…
Robots are becoming ever more autonomous. This expanding ability to take unsupervised decisions renders it imperative that mechanisms are in place to guarantee the safety of behaviours executed by the robot. Moreover, smart autonomous…
The integration of Large Language Models (LLMs) in social robotics presents a unique set of ethical challenges and social impacts. This research is set out to identify ethical considerations that arise in the design and development of these…
In order to collaborate safely and efficiently, robots need to anticipate how their human partners will behave. Some of today's robots model humans as if they were also robots, and assume users are always optimal. Other robots account for…
In human-robot collaboration, the objectives of the human are often unknown to the robot. Moreover, even assuming a known objective, the human behavior is also uncertain. In order to plan a robust robot behavior, a key preliminary question…
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…
Growing concerns about safety and alignment of AI systems highlight the importance of embedding moral capabilities in artificial agents: a promising solution is the use of learning from experience, i.e., Reinforcement Learning. In…
When robots share the same workspace with other intelligent agents (e.g., other robots or humans), they must be able to reason about the behaviors of their neighboring agents while accomplishing the designated tasks. In practice,…
The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
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…
Humans learn how and when to apply forces in the world via a complex physiological and psychological learning process. Attempting to replicate this in vision-language models (VLMs) presents two challenges: VLMs can produce harmful behavior,…
A fruitful collaboration is based on the mutual knowledge of each other skills and on the possibility of communicating their own limits and proposing alternatives to adapt the execution of a task to the capabilities of the collaborators.…
Explainability, in particular, the ability for robots to explain why they have made a decision or behaved in a certain way, is a critical tool in helping users understand the robots they interact and coexist with. Behaviour trees are a…
Human moral judgment is context-dependent and modulated by interpersonal relationships. As large language models (LLMs) increasingly function as decision-support systems, determining whether they encode these social nuances is critical. We…
Power dynamics in human-human communication can impact rapport-building and learning gains, but little is known about how power impacts human-agent communication. In this paper, we examine dominance behavior in utterances between…
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…
In the domain of autonomous household robots, it is of utmost importance for robots to understand human behaviors and provide appropriate services. This requires the robots to possess the capability to analyze complex human behaviors and…