Related papers: Robofriend: An Adpative Storytelling Robotic Teddy…

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…

This paper reviews the use of socially interactive robots to assist in the therapy of children with autism. The extent to which the robots were successful in helping the children in their social, emotional, and communication deficits was…

Creativity in social robots requires further attention in the interdisciplinary field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). This paper investigates the hypothesised connection between the perceived creative agency and the animacy of social…

Humanoid robotics has strong potential to transform daily service and caregiving applications. Although recent advances in general motion tracking within physics engines (GMT) have enabled virtual characters and humanoid robots to reproduce…

In the invited talk at KDAH 2018 workshop (CIKM 2018 conference) I have presented two projects carried out in our HCI lab and target to child: the first one is related to the evaluation in the wild of of a storytelling app for kids based on…

In the dynamic construction industry, traditional robotic integration has primarily focused on automating specific tasks, often overlooking the complexity and variability of human aspects in construction workflows. This paper introduces a…

This paper presents our recent research on integrating artificial emotional intelligence in a social robot (Ryan) and studies the robot's effectiveness in engaging older adults. Ryan is a socially assistive robot designed to provide…

Reinforcement Learning is a promising tool for learning complex policies even in fast-moving and object-interactive domains where human teleoperation or hard-coded policies might fail. To effectively reflect this challenging category of…

We demonstrate a robot-assisted feeding system that enables people with mobility impairments to feed themselves. Our system design embodies Safety, Portability, and User Control, with comprehensive full-stack safety checks, the ability to…

Developing adaptable, extensible, and accurate task bots with minimal or zero human intervention is a significant challenge in dialog research. This thesis examines the obstacles and potential solutions for creating such bots, focusing on…

We present the design and operation of tadpole-mimetic robots prepared for a study of the parenting behaviors of poison frogs, which pair bond and raise their offspring. The mission of these robots is to convince poison frog parents that…

Robotic shepherding problem considers the control and navigation of a group of coherent agents (e.g., a flock of bird or a fleet of drones) through the motion of an external robot, called shepherd. Machine learning based methods have…

ROBEL is an open-source platform of cost-effective robots designed for reinforcement learning in the real world. ROBEL introduces two robots, each aimed to accelerate reinforcement learning research in different task domains: D'Claw is a…

Inspired by infant development, we propose a Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework for autonomous self-exploration in a robotic agent, Baby Sophia, using the BabyBench simulation environment. The agent learns self-touch and hand regard…

Sustaining real-world human-robot interactions requires robots to be sensitive to human behavioural idiosyncrasies and adapt their perception and behaviour models to cater to these individual preferences. For affective robots, this entails…

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…

Humanoid robots are increasingly being integrated into learning contexts to assist teaching and learning. However, challenges remain how to design and incorporate such robots in an educational context. As an important part of teaching…

Various pipes are extensively used in both industrial settings and daily life, but the pipe inspection especially those with narrow sizes are still very challenging with tremendous time and manufacturing consumed. Quadrupedal robots,…

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…

Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…