Related papers: Hearing the Robot's Mind: Sonification for Explici…
A key challenge in developing engaging social robots is creating convincing, autonomous and responsive agents, which users perceive, and treat, as social beings. As a part of the collaborative project: Expressive Agents for Symbiotic…
Feedback design is an important aspect of person-following robots for older adults. This paper presents a user-centred design approach to ensure the design is focused on the needs and preferences of the users. A sequence of user studies…
Recently the field of Human-Robot Interaction gained popularity, due to the wide range of possibilities of how robots can support humans during daily tasks. One form of supportive robots are socially assistive robots which are specifically…
In recent years, many works have investigated the feasibility of conversational robots for performing specific tasks, such as healthcare and interview. Along with this development comes a practical issue: how should we synthesize robotic…
Recent work in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has shown that robots can leverage implicit communicative signals from users to understand how they are being perceived during interactions. For example, these signals can be gaze patterns,…
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…
Research in social robotics is commonly focused on designing robots that imitate human behavior. While this might increase a user's satisfaction and acceptance of robots at first glance, it does not automatically aid a non-expert user in…
When encountering a robot in the wild, it is not inherently clear to human users what the robot's capabilities are. When encountering misunderstandings or problems in spoken interaction, robots often just apologize and move on, without…
In this paper, we identify challenges in children's current information retrieval process, and propose conversational robots as an opportunity to ease this process in a responsible way. Tools children currently use in this process, such as…
In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing their…
In the real world, robots frequently make errors, yet little is known about people's social responses to errors outside of lab settings. Prior work has shown that social signals are reliable and useful for error management in constrained…
Understanding user enjoyment is crucial in human-robot interaction (HRI), as it can impact interaction quality and influence user acceptance and long-term engagement with robots, particularly in the context of conversations with social…
As humanoid service robots are becoming more and more perceptible in public service settings for instance as a guide to welcome visitors or to explain a procedure to follow, it is desirable to improve the comprehensibility of complex issues…
Humans use audio signals in the form of spoken language or verbal reactions effectively when teaching new skills or tasks to other humans. While demonstrations allow humans to teach robots in a natural way, learning from trajectories alone…
To achieve human-like behaviour during speech interactions, it is necessary for a humanoid robot to estimate the location of a human talker. Here, we present a method to optimize the parameters used for the direction of arrival (DOA)…
Inspired by the behavior of humans talking in noisy environments, we propose an embodied embedded cognition approach to improve automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems for robots in challenging environments, such as with ego noise, using…
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…
Sonification, or encoding information in meaningful audio signatures, has several advantages in augmenting or replacing traditional visualization methods for human-in-the-loop decision-making. Standard sonification methods reported in the…
The increased interest in developing next-gen social robots has raised questions about the factors affecting the perception of robot emotions. This study investigates the impact of robot appearances (humanlike, mechanical) and face regions…
We explore new aspects of assistive living on smart human-robot interaction (HRI) that involve automatic recognition and online validation of speech and gestures in a natural interface, providing social features for HRI. We introduce a…