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This study presents novel strategies to investigate the mutual influence of trust and group dynamics in children-robot interaction. We implemented a game-like experimental activity with the humanoid robot iCub and designed a questionnaire…
Robot Learning from Demonstration (RLfD) is a technique for robots to derive policies from instructors' examples. Although the reciprocal effects of student engagement on teacher behavior are widely recognized in the educational community,…
We describe a framework for changing-contact robot manipulation tasks that require the robot to make and break contacts with objects and surfaces. The discontinuous interaction dynamics of such tasks make it difficult to construct and use a…
Language models have seen significant growth in the size of their corpus, leading to notable performance improvements. Yet, there has been limited progress in developing models that handle smaller, more human-like datasets. As part of the…
Robots learn as they interact with humans. Consider a human teleoperating an assistive robot arm: as the human guides and corrects the arm's motion, the robot gathers information about the human's desired task. But how does the human know…
Co-speech gestures enhance interaction experiences between humans as well as between humans and robots. Existing robots use rule-based speech-gesture association, but this requires human labor and prior knowledge of experts to be…
This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task,…
How do children respond to repeated robot errors? While prior research has examined adult reactions to successive robot errors, children's responses remain largely unexplored. In this study, we explore children's reactions to robot social…
In this paper we present Meeting Bot, a reinforcement learning based conversational system that interacts with multiple users to schedule meetings. The system is able to interpret user utterences and map them to preferred time slots, which…
Robotic assistants reduce the manual efforts being put in by humans in their day-to-day tasks. In this paper, we develop a voice-controlled personal assistant robot. The robot takes the human voice commands by its own built-in microphone.…
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of…
As robotic products become more integrated into daily life, there is a greater need to understand authentic and real-world human-robot interactions to inform product design. Across many domestic, educational, and public settings, robots…
Reinforcement learning techniques successfully generate convincing agent behaviors, but it is still difficult to tailor the behavior to align with a user's specific preferences. What is missing is a communication method for the system to…
Object handover is a basic, but essential capability for robots interacting with humans in many applications, e.g., caring for the elderly and assisting workers in manufacturing workshops. It appears deceptively simple, as humans perform…
Fun acts as a catalyst for learning by enhancing motivation, active engagement and knowledge retention. As social robots gain traction as educational tools, understanding how their unique affordances can be leveraged to cultivate fun…
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of…
Inculcating principles of environmental stewardship among the children and youth is needed urgently today for creating a sustainable future. This paper presents a model for promoting environment literacy in India using story telling based…
The end-user programming of social robot behavior is usually limited by a predefined set of movements. We are proposing a puppeteering robotic interface that provides a more intuitive method of programming robot expressive movements. As the…
Our research project (CHATTERS) is about designing a conversational robot for children's digital information search. We want to design a robot with a suitable conversation, that fosters a responsible trust relationship between child and…
In building on theories of Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC), Human-Robot Interaction, and Media Psychology (i.e. Theory of Affective Bonding), the current paper proposes an explanation of how over time, people experience the mediated…