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Soft robotics has emerged as a versatile field with applications across various domains, from healthcare to industrial automation, and more recently, art and interactive installations. The inherent flexibility, adaptability, and safety of…
Zoomorphic robots have the potential to offer companionship and well-being as accessible, low-maintenance alternatives to pet ownership. Many such robots, however, feature limited emotional expression, restricting their potential for rich…
Human-robot studies are expensive to conduct and difficult to control, and as such researchers sometimes turn to human-avatar interaction in the hope of faster and cheaper data collection that can be transferred to the robot domain. In…
As the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance interactions between human agents and robotic systems in a work environment continues to grow, robots must communicate their intents in informative yet straightforward ways. This improves the…
This in-person studio explores how mixed reality (MR) and biometrics can make intangible emotional states tangible through embodied art practices. We begin with two well-established modalities, clay sculpting and free-form 2D drawing, to…
The physical design of a robot suggests expectations of that robot's functionality for human users and collaborators. When those expectations align with the true capabilities of the robot, interaction with the robot is enhanced. However,…
Affective interaction is not merely about recognizing emotions; it is an embodied, situated process shaped by context and co-created through interaction. In affective computing, the role of haptic feedback within dynamic emotional exchanges…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
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…
Emotions, which are an important component of social interaction, can be studied with the help of android robots and their appearance, which is as similar to humans as possible. The production and customization of android robots is…
The growing development of robots with artificial emotional expressiveness raises important questions about their persuasive potential in children's behavior. While research highlights the pragmatic value of emotional expressiveness in…
Animal behavior reflects interactions between the nervous system, body, and environment. Therefore, biomechanics and environmental context must be considered to understand algorithms for behavioral control. Neuromechanical digital twins,…
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…
The rapid advancement of robotics, spanning expanded capabilities, more intuitive interaction, and more integration into real-world workflows, is reshaping what it means for humans and robots to coexist. Beyond sharing physical space, this…
Affective touch offers positive psychological and physiological benefits such as the mitigation of stress and pain. If a robot could realize human-like affective touch, it would open up new application areas, including supporting care work.…
Users develop mental models of robots to conceptualize what kind of interactions they can have with those robots. The conceptualizations are often formed before interactions with the robot and are based only on observing the robot's…
After Big Data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), the subject of Digital Twins has emerged as another promising technology, advocated, built, and sold by various IT companies. The approach aims to produce highly realistic models of real…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…
Tactile sensing is a widely-studied means of implicit communication between robot and human. In this paper, we investigate how tactile sensing can help bridge differences between robotic embodiments in the context of collaborative…
Object handover is a common form of interaction that is widely present in collaborative tasks. However, achieving it efficiently remains a challenge. We address the problem of ensuring resilient robotic actions that can adapt to complex…