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In the future robots will interact more and more with humans and will have to communicate naturally and efficiently. Automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) will play an important role in creating natural interactions and making robots…

Social robots and conversational agents are being explored as supports for wellbeing, goal-setting, and everyday self-regulation. While prior work highlights their potential to motivate and guide users, much of the evidence relies on…

Demanding task environments (e.g., supervising a remotely piloted aircraft) require performing tasks quickly and accurately; however, periods of low and high operator workload can decrease task performance. Intelligent modulation of the…

In task-oriented dialogues with symbiotic robots, the robot usually takes the initiative in dialogue progression and topic selection. In such robot-driven dialogue, the user's sense of participation in the dialogue is reduced because the…

We address the problem of speech enhancement generalisation to unseen environments by performing two manipulations. First, we embed an additional recording from the environment alone, and use this embedding to alter activations in the main…

Mobile robots are increasingly being used in noisy environments for social purposes, e.g. to provide support in healthcare or public spaces. Since these robots also operate beyond human sight, the question arises as to how different robot…

To enhance human-robot social interaction, it is essential for robots to process multiple social cues in a complex real-world environment. However, incongruency of input information across modalities is inevitable and could be challenging…

Studies have shown that in noisy acoustic environments, providing binaural signals to the user of an assistive listening device may improve speech intelligibility and spatial awareness. This paper presents a binaural speech enhancement…

This work introduces a robotic dummy head that fuses the acoustic realism of conventional audiological mannequins with the mobility of robots. The proposed device is capable of moving, talking, and listening as people do, and can be used to…

Natural language is perhaps the most flexible and intuitive way for humans to communicate tasks to a robot. Prior work in imitation learning typically requires each task be specified with a task id or goal image -- something that is often…

While recent automatic speech recognition systems achieve remarkable performance when large amounts of adequate, high quality annotated speech data is used for training, the same systems often only achieve an unsatisfactory result for tasks…

We propose Audio Noise Awareness using Visuals of Indoors for NAVIgation for quieter robot path planning. While humans are naturally aware of the noise they make and its impact on those around them, robots currently lack this awareness. A…

Our goal is to create an interactive natural language interface that efficiently and reliably learns from users to complete tasks in simulated robotics settings. We introduce a neural semantic parsing system that learns new high-level…

Current research in robotic sounds generally focuses on either masking the consequential sound produced by the robot or on sonifying data about the robot to create a synthetic robot sound. We propose to capture, modify, and utilise rather…

Robots are used in more and more complex environments, and are expected to be able to adapt to changes and unknown situations. The easiest and quickest way to adapt is to change the control system of the robot, but for increasingly complex…

We propose augmenting the empathetic capacities of social robots by integrating non-verbal cues. Our primary contribution is the design and labeling of four types of empathetic non-verbal cues, abbreviated as SAFE: Speech, Action (gesture),…

Enabling robots to accurately interpret and execute spoken language instructions is essential for effective human-robot collaboration. Traditional methods rely on speech recognition to transcribe speech into text, often discarding crucial…

Socially assistive robots (SARs) have shown great potential for supplementing well-being support. However, prior studies have found that existing dialogue pipelines for SARs remain limited in real-time latency, back-channeling, and…

The development of human-robot collaboration has the ability to improve manufacturing system performance by leveraging the unique strengths of both humans and robots. On the shop floor, human operators contribute with their adaptability and…

Assistive robot arms can help humans by partially automating their desired tasks. Consider an adult with motor impairments controlling an assistive robot arm to eat dinner. The robot can reduce the number of human inputs -- and how precise…