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Animal welfare education could greatly benefit from customized robots to help children learn about animals and their behavior, and thereby promote positive, safe child-animal interactions. To this end, we ran Participatory Design workshops…
Body movements carry important information about a person's emotions or mental state and are essential in daily communication. Enhancing the ability of machines to understand emotions expressed through body language can improve the…
The Robadom project aims at creating a homecare robot that help and assist people in their daily life, either in doing task for the human or in managing day organization. A robot could have this kind of role only if it is accepted by…
This paper explores the expressive capabilities of a swarm of miniature mobile robots within the context of inter-robot interactions and their mapping to the so-called fundamental emotions. In particular, we investigate how motion and shape…
In recent years, quadruped robots have attracted significant attention due to their practical advantages in maneuverability, particularly when navigating rough terrain and climbing stairs. As these robots become more integrated into various…
Safe human-robot interactions require robots to be able to learn how to behave appropriately in \sout{humans' world} \rev{spaces populated by people} and thus to cope with the challenges posed by our dynamic and unstructured environment,…
This paper presents the design and development of an innovative interactive robotic system to enhance audience engagement using character-like personas. Built upon the foundations of persona-driven dialog agents, this work extends the…
Tactile interaction plays a crucial role in interactions between people. Touch can, for example, help people calm down and lower physiological stress responses. Consequently, it is believed that tactile and haptic interaction matter also in…
Mobile robots have recently been deployed in public spaces such as shopping malls, airports, and urban sidewalks. Most of these robots are designed with human-aware motion planning capabilities but are not designed to communicate with…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated compelling performance in robotic tasks, but its success often hinges on the design of complex, ad hoc reward functions. Researchers have explored how Large Language Models (LLMs) could enable…
Collaborative interactions require social robots to adapt to the dynamics of human affective behaviour. Yet, current approaches for affective behaviour generation in robots focus on instantaneous perception to generate a one-to-one mapping…
Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for…
Human interaction involves very sophisticated non-verbal communication skills like understanding the goals and actions of others and coordinating our own actions accordingly. Neuroscience refers to this mechanism as motor resonance, in the…
We focus on human-robot collaborative transport, in which a robot and a user collaboratively move an object to a goal pose. In the absence of explicit communication, this problem is challenging because it demands tight implicit coordination…
Our goal is to enable robots to express their incapability, and to do so in a way that communicates both what they are trying to accomplish and why they are unable to accomplish it. We frame this as a trajectory optimization problem:…
Collaborative robotics requires effective communication between a robot and a human partner. This work proposes a set of interpretive principles for how a robotic arm can use pointing actions to communicate task information to people by…
In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults' experiential…
The increasing presence of robots alongside humans, such as in human-robot teams in manufacturing, gives rise to research questions about the kind of behaviors people prefer in their robot counterparts. We term actions that support…
Robots in urban environments will inevitably encounter situations beyond their capabilities (e.g., delivery robots unable to press traffic light buttons), necessitating bystander assistance. These spontaneous collaborations possess…
Humanoid robots are increasingly being integrated into learning contexts to assist teaching and learning. However, challenges remain how to design and incorporate such robots in an educational context. As an important part of teaching…