Related papers: Evaluating Transferable Emotion Expressions for Zo…
Many children experience challenges in emotional regulation and social interaction, which can limit their participation in everyday activities and therapeutic programs. For socially assistive robots to be effective in this context, it is…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
Emotion recognition is a topic of significant interest in assistive robotics due to the need to equip robots with the ability to comprehend human behavior, facilitating their effective interaction in our society. Consequently, efficient and…
Addressing the global caregiver shortage through socially assistive robots necessitates a deep understanding of their psychological and physiological impacts on older adults during human-robot interaction (HRI). This study addresses whether…
Social-emotional learning (SEL) skills are essential for children to develop to provide a foundation for future relational and academic success. Using art as a medium for creation or as a topic to provoke conversation is a well-known method…
Our goal is to enable robots to \emph{time} their motion in a way that is purposefully expressive of their internal states, making them more transparent to people. We start by investigating what types of states motion timing is capable of…
While social robots are developed to provide assistance to users through social interactions, their behaviors are dominantly pre-programmed and remote-controlled. Despite the numerous robot control architectures being developed, very few…
The primary aim of this paper is to investigate the integration of emotions into the social navigation framework to analyse its effect on both navigation and human physiological safety and comfort. The proposed framework uses leg detection…
Digital communication tools are limited to visual and auditory information and lack non-verbal information such as touch, which is important for communicating intentions and emotions. In order to solve this problem, the use of haptic…
This paper investigates the specific scenario of high-intensity confrontations between humans and robots, to understand how robots can defuse the conflict. It focuses on the effectiveness of using five different affective expression…
Loneliness is a distressing personal experience and a growing social issue. Social robots could alleviate the pain of loneliness, particularly for those who lack in-person interaction. This paper investigated how the effect of loneliness on…
Large language models have given social robots the ability to autonomously engage in open-domain conversations. However, they are still missing a fundamental social skill: making use of the multiple modalities that carry social…
This work presents a method of incorporating low-cost capacitive tactile sensors on a soft socially assistive robot platform. By embedding conductive thread into the robot's crocheted exterior, we formed a set of low-cost, flexible…
Recent research in affective robots has recognized their potential in supporting human well-being. Due to rapidly developing affective and artificial intelligence technologies, this field of research has undergone explosive expansion and…
The high request for autonomous and flexible HRI implies the necessity of deploying Machine Learning (ML) mechanisms in the robot control. Indeed, the use of ML techniques, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL), makes the robot behaviour,…
Plants offer a paradoxical model for interaction: they are ambient, low-demand presences that nonetheless shape atmosphere, routines, and relationships through temporal rhythms and subtle expressions. In contrast, most human-robot…
In order to create effective storytelling agents three fundamental questions must be answered: first, is a physically embodied agent preferable to a virtual agent or a voice-only narration? Second, does a human voice have an advantage over…
Social robots are increasingly being explored as tools to support emotional wellbeing, particularly in non-clinical settings. Drawing on a range of empirical studies and practical deployments, this paper outlines six key insights that…
Head avatars animated by visual signals have gained popularity, particularly in cross-driving synthesis where the driver differs from the animated character, a challenging but highly practical approach. The recently presented MegaPortraits…
Industrial robots become increasingly prevalent, resulting in a growing need for intuitive, comforting human-robot collaboration. We present a user-aware robotic system that adapts to operator behavior in real time while non-intrusively…