Related papers: Towards Language-Based Modulation of Assistive Rob…
Robots can support humans in tedious tasks, as well as provide social support. However, the decision-making and behavior of robots is not always clear to the human interaction partner. In this work, we discuss the opportunity of using…
We are approaching a future where social robots will progressively become widespread in many aspects of our daily lives, including education, healthcare, work, and personal use. All of such practical applications require that humans and…
Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder find robots easier to communicate with than humans. Thus, robots have been introduced in autism therapies. However, due to the environmental complexity, the used robots often have to be controlled…
The addressee estimation (understanding to whom somebody is talking) is a fundamental task for human activity recognition in multi-party conversation scenarios. Specifically, in the field of human-robot interaction, it becomes even more…
In this paper, we develop an embodied AI system for human-in-the-loop navigation with a wheeled mobile robot. We propose a direct yet effective method of monitoring the robot's current plan to detect changes in the environment that impact…
With robotics rapidly advancing, more effective human-robot interaction is increasingly needed to realize the full potential of robots for society. While spoken language must be part of the solution, our ability to provide spoken language…
Physically assistive robots present an opportunity to significantly increase the well-being and independence of individuals with motor impairments or other forms of disability who are unable to complete activities of daily living. Speech…
As the first robotic platforms slowly approach our everyday life, we can imagine a near future where service robots will be easily accessible by non-expert users through vocal interfaces. The capability of managing natural language would…
Socially Assistive Robots navigate highly sensible environments, which place high demands on safety and communication with users. The reasoning behind an SAR's actions must be transparent at any time to earn users' trust and acceptance.…
We introduce the concept of "empathic grounding" in conversational agents as an extension of Clark's conceptualization of grounding in conversation in which the grounding criterion includes listener empathy for the speaker's affective…
Socially aware robot navigation is a planning paradigm where the robot navigates in human environments and tries to adhere to social constraints while interacting with the humans in the scene. These navigation strategies were further…
Recent work in open-domain conversational agents has demonstrated that significant improvements in model engagingness and humanness metrics can be achieved via massive scaling in both pre-training data and model size (Adiwardana et al.,…
As robots enter collaborative workspaces, ensuring mutual understanding between human workers and robotic systems becomes a prerequisite for trust, safety, and efficiency. In this position paper, we draw on the cooperation scenario of the…
Interaction between caregivers and children plays a critical role in human language acquisition and development. Given this observation, it is remarkable that explicit interaction plays little to no role in artificial language modeling --…
In recent years, autonomous agents have surged in real-world environments such as our homes, offices, and public spaces. However, natural human-robot interaction remains a key challenge. In this paper, we introduce an approach that…
This paper presents an innovative large language model (LLM)-based robotic system for enhancing multi-modal human-robot interaction (HRI). Traditional HRI systems relied on complex designs for intent estimation, reasoning, and behavior…
People employ expressive behaviors to effectively communicate and coordinate their actions with others, such as nodding to acknowledge a person glancing at them or saying "excuse me" to pass people in a busy corridor. We would like robots…
Implicit communication is crucial in human-robot collaboration (HRC), where contextual information, such as intentions, is conveyed as implicatures, forming a natural part of human interaction. However, enabling robots to appropriately use…
Assistive robotic systems have shown growing potential to improve the quality of life of those with disabilities. As researchers explore the automation of various caregiving tasks, considerations for how the technology can still preserve…
Natural language understanding for robotics can require substantial domain- and platform-specific engineering. For example, for mobile robots to pick-and-place objects in an environment to satisfy human commands, we can specify the language…