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While robots are increasingly integrated into the built environment, little is known how their qualities can meaningfully influence our spaces to facilitate enjoyable and agreeable interaction, rather than robotic settings that are driven…
Many collaborative human-robot tasks require the robot to stay safe and work efficiently around humans. Since the robot can only stay safe with respect to its own model of the human, we want the robot to learn a good model of the human in…
Social robot navigation is an evolving research field that aims to find efficient strategies to safely navigate dynamic environments populated by humans. A critical challenge in this domain is the accurate modeling of human motion, which…
Robots can learn preferences from human demonstrations, but their success depends on how informative these demonstrations are. Being informative is unfortunately very challenging, because during teaching, people typically get no…
As the autonomy and capabilities of robotic systems increase, they are expected to play the role of teammates rather than tools and interact with human collaborators in a more realistic manner, creating a more human-like relationship. Given…
Loosely based on principles of similarity-attraction, robots intended for social contexts are being designed with increasing human similarity to facilitate their reception by and communication with human interactants. However, the…
In this project, we focus on human-robot interaction in caregiving scenarios like bathing, where physical contact is inevitable and necessary for proper task execution because force must be applied to the skin. Using finite element…
Touch is a key part of interaction and communication between humans, but has still been little explored in human-robot interaction. In this work, participants were asked to approach and touch a humanoid robot on the hand (Nao - 26…
As environments involving both robots and humans become increasingly common, so does the need to account for people during planning. To plan effectively, robots must be able to respond to and sometimes influence what humans do. This…
Animal swarms displaying a variety of typical flocking patterns would not exist without underlying safe, optimal and stable dynamics of the individuals. The emergence of these universal patterns can be efficiently reconstructed with…
As robots have become increasingly common in human-rich environments, it is critical that they are able to exhibit social cues to be perceived as a cooperative and socially-conformant team member. We investigate the effect of robot gaze…
As social robots become increasingly prevalent in day-to-day environments, they will participate in conversations and appropriately manage the information shared with them. However, little is known about how robots might appropriately…
Unlike their biological cousins, the majority of existing quadrupedal robots are constructed with rigid chassis. This results in motion that is either beetle-like or distinctly robotic, lacking the natural fluidity characteristic of…
When robots enter everyday human environments, they need to understand their tasks and how they should perform those tasks. To encode these, reward functions, which specify the objective of a robot, are employed. However, designing reward…
Communication robots often need to initiate conversations with people in public spaces. At the same time, such robots must not disturb pedestrians. To handle these two requirements, an agent needs to estimate the communication desires of…
Robots (and computers) are increasingly being used in scenarios where they interact socially with people. How people react to these agents is telling about the perceived animacy of such agents. Mistreatment of robots (or computers) by…
Emotions are the intrinsic or extrinsic representations of our experiences. The importance of emotions during a human-human interaction is immense as it formulates the basis of our interaction framework. There are several approaches in…
This work aims to interpret human behavior to anticipate potential user confusion when a robot provides explanations for failure, allowing the robot to adapt its explanations for more natural and efficient collaboration. Using a dataset…
Social robots must adjust to human proxemic norms to ensure user comfort and engagement. While prior research demonstrates that eye-tracking features reliably estimate comfort in human-human interactions, their applicability to interactions…
The growing development of robots with artificial emotional expressiveness raises important questions about their persuasive potential in children's behavior. While research highlights the pragmatic value of emotional expressiveness in…