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Contemporary approaches to perception, planning, estimation, and control have allowed robots to operate robustly as our remote surrogates in uncertain, unstructured environments. This progress now creates an opportunity for robots to…
How human-like do conversational robots need to look to enable long-term human-robot conversation? One essential aspect of long-term interaction is a human's ability to adapt to the varying degrees of a conversational partner's engagement…
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…
Human talkers often address listeners with language-comprehension challenges, such as hard-of-hearing or non-native adults, by globally slowing down their speech. However, it remains unclear whether this strategy actually makes speech more…
Imitation learning in robots, also called programing by demonstration, has made important advances in recent years, allowing humans to teach context dependant motor skills/tasks to robots. We propose to extend the usual contexts…
Robot-moderated group discussions have the potential to facilitate engaging and productive interactions among human participants. Previous work on topic management in conversational agents has predominantly focused on human engagement and…
TalkWithMachines aims to enhance human-robot interaction by contributing to interpretable industrial robotic systems, especially for safety-critical applications. The presented paper investigates recent advancements in Large Language Models…
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…
Some robots can interact with humans using natural language, and identify service requests through human-robot dialog. However, few robots are able to improve their language capabilities from this experience. In this paper, we develop a…
As social robots get more deeply integrated intoour everyday lives, they will be expected to engage in meaningful conversations and exhibit socio-emotionally intelligent listening behaviors when interacting with people. Active listening and…
Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems in real-world settings need to handle imperfect audio, often degraded by hardware limitations or environmental noise, while accommodating diverse user groups. In human-robot interaction (HRI),…
Underlying mechanisms of speech perception masked by background speakers, a common daily listening condition, are often investigated using various and lengthy psychophysical tests. The presence of a social agent, such as an interactive…
For robots to perform assistive tasks in unstructured home environments, they must learn and reason on the semantic knowledge of the environments. Despite a resurgence in the development of semantic reasoning architectures, these methods…
The paper presents an experiment on the effects of adaptive emotional alignment between agents, considered a prerequisite for empathic communication, in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). Using the NAO robot, we investigate the impact of an…
Service robots need to show appropriate social behaviour in order to be deployed in social environments such as healthcare, education, retail, etc. Some of the main capabilities that robots should have are navigation and conversational…
Robots can use auditory, visual, or haptic interfaces to convey information to human users. The way these interfaces select signals is typically pre-defined by the designer: for instance, a haptic wristband might vibrate when the robot is…
Artificial Intelligence (AI) has significantly advanced in recent years, driving innovation across various fields, especially in robotics. Even though robots can perform complex tasks with increasing autonomy, challenges remain in ensuring…
In the rapidly evolving landscape of human-robot collaboration, effective communication between humans and robots is crucial for complex task execution. Traditional request-response systems often lack naturalness and may hinder efficiency.…
Voice-based communication is often cited as one of the most `natural' ways in which humans and robots might interact, and the recent availability of accurate automatic speech recognition and intelligible speech synthesis has enabled…
In this paper, we extended the method proposed in [21] to enable humans to interact naturally with autonomous agents through vocal and textual conversations. Our extended method exploits the inherent capabilities of pre-trained large…