Related papers: Developing Social Robots with Empathetic Non-Verba…
It is crucial that robots' performance can be improved after deployment, as they are inherently likely to encounter novel scenarios never seen before. This paper presents an innovative solution: an interactive learning-based robot system…
The robotic intervention for individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has generally used pre-defined scripts to deliver verbal content during one-to-one therapy sessions. This practice restricts the use of robots to limited,…
A robot in a human-centric environment needs to account for the human's intent and future motion in its task and motion planning to ensure safe and effective operation. This requires symbolic reasoning about probable future actions and the…
Existing human-robot interaction systems often lack mechanisms for sustained personalization and dynamic adaptation in multi-user environments, limiting their effectiveness in real-world deployments. We present HARMONI, a multimodal…
Simulation is an invaluable tool for developing and evaluating controllers for self-driving cars. Current simulation frameworks are driven by highly-specialist domain specific languages, and so a natural language interface would greatly…
Effective communication is vital in healthcare, especially across language barriers, where non-verbal cues and gestures are critical. This paper presents a privacy-preserving vision-language framework for medical interpreter robots that…
Human emotions are complex and can be conveyed through nuanced touch gestures. Previous research has primarily focused on how humans recognize emotions through touch or on identifying key features of emotional expression for robots.…
Social robots need intelligence in order to safely coexist and interact with humans. Robots without functional abilities in understanding others and unable to empathise might be a societal risk and they may lead to a society of socially…
With the emergence of large language models (LLMs), investigating if they can surpass humans in areas such as emotion recognition and empathetic responding has become a focal point of research. This paper presents a comprehensive study…
To provide effective and enjoyable human-robot interaction, it is important for social robots to exhibit nonverbal behaviors, such as a handshake or a hug. However, the traditional approach of reproducing pre-coded motions allows users to…
Nichtverbale Signale sind ein elementarer Bestandteil der menschlichen Kommunikation. Sie erf\"ullen eine Vielzahl von Funktionen bei der Kl\"arung von Mehrdeutigkeiten, der subtilen Aushandlung von Rollen oder dem Ausdruck dessen, was im…
Large language models (LLMs) have enabled conversational robots to move beyond constrained dialogue toward free-form interaction. However, without context-specific adaptation, generic LLM outputs can be ineffective or inappropriate. This…
With large language models (LLMs) becoming increasingly prevalent in daily life, so too has the tendency to attribute to them human-like minds and emotions, or anthropomorphize them. Here, we investigate dimensions people use to…
The growing presence of service robots in human-centric environments, such as warehouses, demands seamless and intuitive human-robot collaboration. In this paper, we propose a collaborative shelf-picking framework that combines multimodal…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
Social interactions form the foundation of human societies. Artificial intelligence has made significant progress in certain areas, but enabling machines to seamlessly understand social interactions remains an open challenge. It is…
This paper tackles the challenging task of evaluating socially situated conversational robots and presents a novel objective evaluation approach that relies on multimodal user behaviors. In this study, our main focus is on assessing the…
Speech is a natural interface for humans to interact with robots. Yet, aligning a robot's voice to its appearance is challenging due to the rich vocabulary of both modalities. Previous research has explored a few labels to describe robots…
Many people suffer from mental health problems but not everyone seeks professional help or has access to mental health care. AI chatbots have increasingly become a go-to for individuals who either have mental disorders or simply want…
Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants to…