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People with lower and upper body disabilities can benefit from wheelchairs and robotic arms to improve mobility and independence. Prior assistive interfaces, such as touchscreens and voice-driven predefined commands, often remain…
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…
Social robots are increasingly introduced into children's lives as educational and social companions, yet little is known about how these products might best be introduced to their environments. The emergence of the "unboxing" phenomenon in…
Stress impacts driving-related cognitive functions like attention and decision-making, and may arise in automated vehicles due to non-driving tasks. Unobtrusive relaxation techniques are needed to regulate stress without distracting from…
Increasing anthropomorphic robot behavioral design could affect trust and cooperation positively. However, studies have shown contradicting results and suggest a task-dependent relationship between robots that display emotions and trust.…
Robots which interact with the physical world will benefit from a fine-grained tactile understanding of objects and surfaces. Additionally, for certain tasks, robots may need to know the haptic properties of an object before touching it. To…
Despite growing interest in Learning-by-Teaching (LbT), few studies have explored how this paradigm can be implemented with autonomous, peer-like social robots in real classrooms. Most prior work has relied on scripted or Wizard-of-Oz…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
AI-assisted learning companion robots are increasingly used in early education. Many parents express concerns about content appropriateness, while they also value how AI and robots could supplement their limited skill, time, and energy to…
Promoting exploratory movements through contingent feedback can positively influence motor development in infancy. Our ongoing work gears toward the development of a robot-assisted contingency learning environment through the use of small…
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…
This study aimed to develop a system that provides vibrotactile feedback corresponding to the emotional content of text when a communication robot speaks. We used OpenAI's "GPT-4o Mini" for emotion estimation, extracting valence and arousal…
Quadruped robots are showing impressive abilities to navigate the real world. If they are to become more integrated into society, social trust in interactions with humans will become increasingly important. Additionally, robots will need to…
Robots come in various forms and have different characteristics that may shape the interaction with them. In human-human interactions, height is a characteristic that shapes human dynamics, with taller people typically perceived as more…
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…
In chronic diseases, obtaining a correct diagnosis and providing the most appropriate treatments often is not enough to guarantee an improvement of the clinical condition of a patient. Poor adherence to medical prescriptions constitutes one…
This paper describes an experimental evaluation aimed at detecting the users' perception of the robot's empathic abilities during a conversation. The results have been then analyzed to search for a possible relationship between the…
Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used to improve social skills in children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The DREAM project explores how to deliver effective RAT interventions to ASD children within a…
High-resolution optical tactile sensors are increasingly used in robotic learning environments due to their ability to capture large amounts of data directly relating to agent-environment interaction. However, there is a high barrier of…
Children and adults with cerebral palsy (CP) can have involuntary upper limb movements as a consequence of the symptoms that characterize their motor disability, leading to difficulties in communicating with caretakers and peers. We…