Related papers: Developing Autonomous Robot-Mediated Behavior Coac…
AI companion chatbots, such as those offered by Replika and CharacterAI, increasingly function as always-available companions that provide empathy, validation, and support. While these systems appear to meet basic needs for connection,…
In human-robot interaction (HRI), we study how humans interact with robots, but also the effects of robot behavior on human perception and well-being. Especially, the influence on humans by tandem robots with one human controlled and one…
In this work, we present a new dataset and a computational strategy for a digital coach that aims to guide users in practicing the protocols of self-attachment therapy. Our framework augments a rule-based conversational agent with a…
Creativity is increasingly recognized as an important skill in education, and storytelling can enhance motivation and engagement among students. However, conventional storytelling methods often lack the interactive elements necessary to…
As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…
Individuals are turning to increasingly anthropomorphic, general-purpose chatbots for AI companionship, rather than roleplay-specific platforms. However, not much is known about how individuals perceive and conduct their relationships with…
We present a Research-through-Design case study of the design and development of an intimate-space tangible device perhaps best understood as a socially assistive robot, aimed at scaffolding children's efforts at emotional regulation. This…
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…
The study illustrates a first step towards an ongoing work aimed at developing a dataset of dialogues potentially useful for customer service conversation management between humans and AI chatbots. The approach exploits ChatGPT 3.5 to…
Humans have internal models of robots (like their physical capabilities), the world (like what will happen next), and their tasks (like a preferred goal). However, human internal models are not always perfect: for example, it is easy to…
The rapid advancement of chat-based language models has led to remarkable progress in complex task-solving. However, their success heavily relies on human input to guide the conversation, which can be challenging and time-consuming. This…
Emotional expressions and their changes during an interaction affect heavily how we perceive and behave towards other persons. To design an HRI scenario that makes possible to observe, understand, and model affective interactions and…
Dialogue systems without consistent responses are not fascinating. In this study, we build a dialogue system that can respond based on a given character setting (persona) to bring consistency. Considering the trend of the rapidly increasing…
The growing use of service robots in hospitality highlights the need to understand how to effectively communicate with pre-occupied customers. This study investigates the efficacy of commonly used communication modalities by service robots,…
Successful entrainment during collaboration positively affects trust, willingness to collaborate, and likeability towards collaborators. In this paper, we present a mixed-method study to investigate characteristics of successful entrainment…
When robots interact with human partners, often these partners change their behavior in response to the robot. On the one hand this is challenging because the robot must learn to coordinate with a dynamic partner. But on the other hand --…
Open-domain conversational agents or chatbots are becoming increasingly popular in the natural language processing community. One of the challenges is enabling them to converse in an empathetic manner. Current neural response generation…
In this paper we present a fully autonomous and intrinsically motivated robot usable for HRI experiments. We argue that an intrinsically motivated approach based on the Predictive Information formalism, like the one presented here, could…
In this paper, we consider the detection of a decrease of engagement by users spontaneously interacting with a socially assistive robot in a public space. We first describe the UE-HRI dataset that collects spontaneous Human-Robot…
Emotion expressions serve as important communicative signals and are crucial cues in intuitive interactions between humans. Hence, it is essential to include these fundamentals in robotic behavior strategies when interacting with humans to…