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This paper presents a series of experiments in collective social robotics, spanning more than 10 years, with the long-term aim of building embodied models of (aspects) of cultural evolution. Initial experiments demonstrated the emergence of…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…
The challenge of robotic reproduction -- making of new robots by recombining two existing ones -- has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an…
This paper presents Tinker Tales, an interactive storytelling framework in the format of a board game, designed to support both narrative development and AI literacy in early childhood. The framework integrates tangible and speech-based…
Rises in the number of animal abuse cases are reported around the world. While chatbots have been effective in influencing their users' perceptions and behaviors, little if any research has hitherto explored the design of chatbots that…
A key challenge in developing engaging social robots is creating convincing, autonomous and responsive agents, which users perceive, and treat, as social beings. As a part of the collaborative project: Expressive Agents for Symbiotic…
This work introduces Alfie, an interactive robot that is capable of answering moral (deontological) questions of a user. The interaction of Alfie is designed in a way in which the user can offer an alternative answer when the user disagrees…
In this paper we present an integrated robotic system capable of participating in and performing a wide range of educational and entertainment tasks, in collaboration with one or more children. The system, called ChildBot, features…
We introduce RoboBrain 2.0, our latest generation of embodied vision-language foundation models, designed to unify perception, reasoning, and planning for complex embodied tasks in physical environments. It comes in two variants: a…
We introduce Toyteller, an AI-powered storytelling system where users generate a mix of story text and visuals by directly manipulating character symbols like they are toy-playing. Anthropomorphized symbol motions can convey rich and…
Animals and robots exist in a physical world and must coordinate their bodies to achieve behavioral objectives. With recent developments in deep reinforcement learning, it is now possible for scientists and engineers to obtain sensorimotor…
Social robots and interactive computer applications have the potential to foster early language development in young children by acting as peer learning companions. However, studies have found that children only trust robots which behave in…
High-quality demonstrations are necessary when learning complex and challenging manipulation tasks. In this work, we introduce an approach to puppeteer a robot by controlling a virtual robot in an augmented reality setting. Our system…
This paper presents the results of a pilot study that introduces social robots into kindergarten and first-grade classroom tasks. This study aims to understand 1) how effective social robots are in administering educational activities and…
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational…
Autistic students often face challenges in social interaction, which can hinder their educational and personal development. This study introduces Echo-Teddy, a Large Language Model (LLM)-based social robot designed to support autistic…
One issue in aging is how to stimulate the cognitive skills of older adults. One way to address it is the use of serious games delivered through humanoid robots, to provide engaging ways to perform exercises to train memory, attention,…
Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better…
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.…
This work introduces a robotic dummy head that fuses the acoustic realism of conventional audiological mannequins with the mobility of robots. The proposed device is capable of moving, talking, and listening as people do, and can be used to…