Related papers: Designing robots with the context in mind -- One d…
Robots that interact with humans in a physical space or application need to think about the person's posture, which typically comes from visual sensors like cameras and infra-red. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms use…
Vision-language models (VLMs) are essential to Embodied AI, enabling robots to perceive, reason, and act in complex environments. They also serve as the foundation for the recent Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. Yet most evaluations of…
My research centers on the development of context-adaptive AI systems to improve end-user adoption through the integration of technical methods. I deploy these AI systems across various interaction modalities, including user interfaces and…
This paper explores the challenges faced by assistive robots in effectively cooperating with humans, requiring them to anticipate human behavior, predict their actions' impact, and generate understandable robot actions. The study focuses on…
Mobile robots are increasingly populating homes, hospitals, shopping malls, factory floors, and other human environments. Human society has social norms that people mutually accept; obeying these norms is an essential signal that someone is…
Robots operating in human-shared environments must not only achieve task-level navigation objectives such as safety and efficiency, but also adapt their behavior to human preferences. However, as human preferences are typically expressed in…
When designing robots to assist in everyday human activities, it is crucial to enhance user requests with visual cues from their surroundings for improved intent understanding. This process is defined as a multimodal classification task.…
As Robots become ever more important in our daily lives there's growing need for understanding how they're perceived by people. This study aims to investigate how the user perception of robots is influenced by displays of personality. Using…
Sustainability is no longer a matter of choice but is invariably linked to the survival of the entire ecosystem of our planet Earth. As robotics technology is growing at an exponential rate, it is crucial to examine its implications for…
In human-robot collaborative interaction scenarios, nonverbal communication plays an important role. Both, signals sent by a human collaborator need to be identified and interpreted by the robotic system, and the signals sent by the robot…
Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants to…
This review paper focuses on different aspects of perceived safety for a number of autonomous physical systems. This is a major aspect of robotics research, as more and more applications allow human and autonomous systems to share their…
In this paper, we propose a minimum set of concepts and signals needed to track the social state during Human-Robot Interaction. We look into the problem of complex continuous interactions in a social context with multiple humans and…
The sense of family connectedness may support positive outcomes including individual well-being, resilience, and healthy family functioning. However, as technologies advance, they often replace human-human interactions instead of nurturing…
A smart space offers entirely new opportunities for end users by adapting services accordingly to make life easy. A number of architectural designs have been proposed to design context awareness systems and adaptation behavior. However, the…
Socially assistive robots could help to support people's well-being in contexts such as art therapy where human therapists are scarce, by making art such as paintings together with people in a way that is emotionally contingent and…
Physical interactions with socially assistive robots (SARs) positively affect user wellbeing. However, haptic experiences when touching a SAR are typically limited to perceiving the robot's movements or shell texture, while other modalities…
As robots take on caregiving roles, ensuring equitable and unbiased interactions with diverse populations is critical. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) serve as key components in shaping robotic behavior, speech, and decision-making,…
Assistive robot arms try to help their users perform everyday tasks. One way robots can provide this assistance is shared autonomy. Within shared autonomy, both the human and robot maintain control over the robot's motion: as the robot…
During the planning phase of industrial robot workplaces, hazard analyses are required so that potential hazards for human workers can be identified and appropriate safety measures can be implemented. Existing hazard analysis methods use…