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We consider a service robot that offers chocolate treats to people passing in its proximity: it has the capability of predicting in advance a person's intention to interact, and to actuate an "offering" gesture, subtly extending the tray of…
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…
Inner Speech is an essential but also elusive human psychological process which refers to an everyday covert internal conversation with oneself. We argue that programming a robot with an overt self-talk system, which simulates human inner…
Social robots are becoming more and more perceptible in public service settings. For engaging people in a natural environment a smooth social interaction as well as acceptance by the users are important issues for future successful…
Robots are increasingly being deployed in public spaces. However, the general population rarely has the opportunity to nominate what they would prefer or expect a robot to do in these contexts. Since most people have little or no experience…
In this study, we develop a dialogue system for a dialogue robot competition. In the system, the characteristics of sightseeing spots are expressed as "attribute vectors" in advance, and the user is questioned on the different attributes of…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
Social robots are required not only to understand human intentions but also to effectively communicate their intentions or own internal states to users. This study explores the use of sonification to provide explicit auditory feedback,…
A single mobile service robot may generate hundreds of encounters with pedestrians, yet there is little published data on the factors influencing these incidental human-robot encounters. We report the results of a between-subjects…
With the increasing deployment of robots in public spaces, encounters between robots and incidentally copresent persons (InCoPs) are becoming more frequent. However, InCoPs remain largely underexplored in the literature, particularly from a…
Conversational agents, such as chatbots, have increasingly found their way into many dimensions of our lives, including entertainment and education. In this exploratory study we built a child-friendly chatbot, "Ask Me Anything" (AMA), and…
Autonomy and independent navigation are vital to daily life but remain challenging for individuals with blindness. Robotic systems can enhance mobility and confidence by providing intelligent navigation assistance. However, fully autonomous…
This paper describes a between-subjects Amazon Mechanical Turk study (n = 220) that investigated how a robot's affective narrative influences its ability to elicit empathy in human observers. We first conducted a pilot study to develop and…
As social service robots become commonplace, it is essential for them to effectively interpret human signals, such as verbal, gesture, and eye gaze, when people need to focus on their primary tasks to minimize interruptions and…
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…
When deploying interactive agents like (social) robots in public spaces they need to be able to interact with a diverse audience, with members each having individual diversity characteristics and prior experiences with interactive systems.…
Robots can learn preferences from human demonstrations, but their success depends on how informative these demonstrations are. Being informative is unfortunately very challenging, because during teaching, people typically get no…
This research investigates the impact of social robot participation in group conversations and assesses the effectiveness of various addressing policies. The study involved 300 participants, divided into groups of four, interacting with a…
Research currently being conducted on the use of robots as human labor support technology. In particular, the service industry needs to allocate more manpower, and it will be important for robots to support people. This study focuses on…
This paper introduces benefits and detriments of a robot bartender that is capable of adapting the interaction with human users according to their preferences in drinks, music, and hobbies. We believe that a personalised experience during a…