Related papers: Using the Pepper Robot to Support Sign Language Co…
This research explores using lightweight deep neural network architectures to enable the humanoid robot Pepper to understand American Sign Language (ASL) and facilitate non-verbal human-robot interaction. First, we introduce a lightweight…
The Pepper robot has become a widely recognised face for the perceived potential of social robots to enter our homes and businesses. However, to date, commercial and research applications of the Pepper have been largely restricted to roles…
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…
This article describes the preliminary qualitative results of a therapeutic laboratory involving the Pepper robot, as a facilitator, to promote autonomy and functional acquisition in autistic children with low support needs (level 1…
In this paper we present our work with the Pepper robot, a service robot from SoftBank Robotics. We had two main goals in this work: improving the autonomy of this robot by increasing its awareness of the environment; and enhance the robot…
In this paper, we illustrate our work on improving the accessibility of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), presenting a study on human-robot interaction where the end-users are either deaf or hearing-impaired people. Current trends in robotic…
Social robots often rely on visual perception to understand their users and the environment. Recent advancements in data-driven approaches for computer vision have demonstrated great potentials for applying deep-learning models to enhance a…
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…
With the recent advancements in intelligent personal assistants (IPAs), their popularity is rapidly increasing when it comes to utilizing Automatic Speech Recognition within households. In this study, we used a Wizard-of-Oz methodology to…
Spoken language is the most natural way for a human to communicate with a robot. It may seem intuitive that a robot should communicate with users in their native language. However, it is not clear if a user's perception of a robot is…
A central challenge towards developing robots that can relate human language to their perception and actions is the scarcity of natural language annotations in diverse robot datasets. Moreover, robot policies that follow natural language…
Although innovation and the support of new technologies are much needed to ease the burden on the education system, social robots in schools to help teachers with educational tasks are rare. Child-Robot Interaction (CRI) could support…
Humanoid robots are designed to be relatable to humans for applications such as customer support and helpdesk services. However, many such systems, including Softbank's Pepper, fall short because they fail to communicate effectively with…
Sign language is a natural and visual form of language that uses movements and expressions to convey meaning, serving as a crucial means of communication for individuals who are deaf or hard-of-hearing (DHH). However, the number of people…
Sign Language is used to facilitate the communication between Deaf and non-Deaf people. It uses signs-words with basic structural elements such as handshape, parts of face, body or space, and the orientation of the fingers-palm. Sign…
Despite recent advances in integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into social robotics, two weaknesses persist. First, existing implementations on platforms like Pepper often rely on cascaded Speech-to-Text (STT)->LLM->Text-to-Speech…
For a period of three weeks in June 2021, we embedded a social robot (Softbank Pepper) in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school, with a focus on supporting the well-being of autistic children. Our methodology to design and embed the…
A primary challenge for the deaf and hearing-impaired community stems from the communication gap with the hearing society, which can greatly impact their daily lives and result in social exclusion. To foster inclusivity in society, our…
Foundational models have advanced social robotics, enabling richer perception and communicative interaction with users. However, current systems still struggle with multi-turn engagement, social-relationship reasoning, and contextually…
Sign language is a visual language that enhances communication between people and is frequently used as the primary form of communication by people with hearing loss. Even so, not many people with hearing loss use sign language, and they…