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Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
Application of humanoid robots has been common in the field of healthcare and education. It has been recurrently used to improve social behavior and mollify distress level among children with autism, cancer and cerebral palsy. This article…
This paper presents a novel learning-based approach to dynamic robot-to-human handover, addressing the challenges of delivering objects to a moving receiver. We hypothesize that dynamic handover, where the robot adjusts to the receiver's…
In this paper we study the personalized book recommender system in a child-robot interactive environment. Firstly, we propose a novel text search algorithm using an inverse filtering mechanism that improves the efficiency. Secondly, we…
This article proposes an emotive lifelike robotic face, called ExpressionBot, that is designed to support verbal and non-verbal communication between the robot and humans, with the goal of closely modeling the dynamics of natural…
With growing societal acceptance and increasing cost efficiency due to mass production, service robots are beginning to cross from the industrial to the social domain. Currently, customer service robots tend to be digital and emulate social…
Object handover is a common form of interaction that is widely present in collaborative tasks. However, achieving it efficiently remains a challenge. We address the problem of ensuring resilient robotic actions that can adapt to complex…
As the global population ages, many seniors face the problem of loneliness. Companion robots offer a potential solution. However, current companion robots often lack advanced functionality, while task-oriented robots are not designed for…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
[Context] Interviewing stakeholders is the most popular requirements elicitation technique among multiple methods. The success of an interview depends on the collaboration of the interviewee which can be fostered through the interviewer's…
We introduce SoftMimic, a framework for learning compliant whole-body control policies for humanoid robots from example motions. Imitating human motions with reinforcement learning allows humanoids to quickly learn new skills, but existing…
Quadrupedal animals can perform agile and playful tasks while interacting with real-world objects. For instance, a trained dog can track and catch a flying frisbee before it touches the ground, while a cat left alone at home may leap to…
Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot…
This article describes the preliminary qualitative results of a therapeutic laboratory involving the Pepper robot, as a facilitator, to promote autonomy and functional acquisition in autistic children with low support needs (level 1…
AI Stories is a proposed interactive dialogue system, that lets children co-create narrative worlds through conversation. Over the next three years this system will be developed and tested within pediatric wards, where it offers a useful…
Learning highly dynamic behaviors for robots has been a longstanding challenge. Traditional approaches have demonstrated robust locomotion, but the exhibited behaviors lack diversity and agility. They employ approximate models, which lead…
Social robots are emerging as learning companions for children, and research shows that they facilitate the development of interest and learning even through brief interactions. However, little is known about how such technologies might…
Human emotions are expressed through multiple modalities, including verbal and non-verbal information. Moreover, the affective states of human users can be the indicator for the level of engagement and successful interaction, suitable for…
Humans and animals excel in combining information from multiple sensory modalities, controlling their complex bodies, adapting to growth, failures, or using tools. These capabilities are also highly desirable in robots. They are displayed…
Albrecht and Stone (2018) state that modeling of changing behaviors remains an open problem "due to the essentially unconstrained nature of what other agents may do". In this work we evaluate the adaptability of neural artificial agents…