Related papers: Assistive Robots and Reasonable Work Assignment Re…
Recent work in sim2real has successfully enabled robots to act in physical environments by training in simulation with a diverse ''population'' of environments (i.e. domain randomization). In this work, we focus on enabling generalization…
Addressing the global caregiver shortage through socially assistive robots necessitates a deep understanding of their psychological and physiological impacts on older adults during human-robot interaction (HRI). This study addresses whether…
High levels of robot autonomy are a common goal, but there is a significant risk that the greater the autonomy of the robot the lesser the autonomy of the human working with the robot. For vulnerable populations like older adults who…
The demand for social robots in fields like healthcare, education, and entertainment increases due to their emotional adaptation features. These robots leverage multimodal communication, incorporating speech, facial expressions, and…
The integration of the physical capabilities of an industrial collaborative robot with a social virtual character may represent a viable solution to enhance the workers' perception of the system as an embodied social entity and increase…
Stereotypes, bias, and discrimination have been extensively documented in Machine Learning (ML) methods such as Computer Vision (CV) [18, 80], Natural Language Processing (NLP) [6], or both, in the case of large image and caption models…
Without finger function, people with C5-7 spinal cord injury (SCI) regularly utilize wrist extension to passively close the fingers and thumb together for grasping. Wearable assistive grasping devices often focus on this familiar…
We present an ongoing project that aims to develop a social robot to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. Our approach uses automated planning as a core component for action selection in…
AI-based decision support tools (ADS) are increasingly used to augment human decision-making in high-stakes, social contexts. As public sector agencies begin to adopt ADS, it is critical that we understand workers' experiences with these…
Sense of agency is one factor that influences people's preferences for robot assistance and a phenomenon from cognitive science that represents the experience of control over one's environment. However, in assistive robotics literature, we…
Social robots have emerged as valuable contributors to individuals' well-being coaching. Notably, their integration into long-term human coaching trials shows particular promise, emphasizing a complementary role alongside human coaches…
Assistive shared-control robots have the potential to transform the lives of millions of people afflicted with severe motor impairments. The usefulness of shared-control robots typically relies on the underlying autonomy's ability to infer…
Deep learning's success in perception, natural language processing, etc. inspires hopes for advancements in autonomous robotics. However, real-world robotics face challenges like variability, high-dimensional state spaces, non-linear…
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…
Robotics and automation have the potential to significantly improve quality of life for people with assistive needs and their carers. Adoption of such technologies at this point in time is far from widespread. This paper presents a novel…
Among the many anticipated roles for robots in the future is that of being a human teammate. Aside from all the technological hurdles that have to be overcome with respect to hardware and control to make robots fit to work with humans, the…
Human trust plays a crucial role in the effectiveness of human-robot collaboration. Despite its significance, the development and maintenance of an optimal trust level are obstructed by the complex nature of influencing factors and their…
Robots are ubiquitous in small-to-large-scale manufacturers. While collaborative robots (cobots) have significant potential in these settings due to their flexibility and ease of use, proper integration is critical to realize their full…
A large body of compelling evidence has been accumulated demonstrating that embodiment - the agent's physical setup, including its shape, materials, sensors and actuators - is constitutive for any form of cognition and as a consequence,…
Many of today's robot perception systems aim at accomplishing perception tasks that are too simplistic and too hard. They are too simplistic because they do not require the perception systems to provide all the information needed to…