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Exploratoration and self-observation are key mechanisms of infant sensorimotor development. These processes are further guided by parental scaffolding accelerating skill and knowledge acquisition. In developmental robotics, this approach…
Facial expressiveness plays a crucial role in a robot's ability to engage and interact with children. Prior research has shown that expressive robots can enhance child engagement during human-robot interactions. However, many robots used in…
The question of how an effective and efficient communication system can emerge in a population of agents that need to solve a particular task attracts more and more attention from researchers in many fields, including artificial…
Automated Speech Recognition shows superhuman performance for adult English speech on a range of benchmarks, but disappoints when fed children's speech. This has long sat in the way of child-robot interaction. Recent evolutions in…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as valuable tools for many natural language understanding tasks. In safety-critical applications such as healthcare, the utility of these models is governed by their ability to generate outputs that…
In early developmental contexts, particularly in parent-child interaction analysis, alignment involves families and professionals such as speech-language pathologists (SLPs) who interpret children's everyday interactions from different…
In this paper, we introduce PanGu-Bot, a Chinese pre-trained open-domain dialogue generation model based on a large pre-trained language model (PLM) PANGU-alpha (Zeng et al.,2021). Different from other pre-trained dialogue models trained…
Partial subtle mirroring of nonverbal behaviors during conversations (also known as mimicking or parallel empathy), is essential for rapport building, which in turn is essential for optimal human-human communication outcomes. Mirroring has…
This work explores a group learning scenario with an autonomous empathic robot. We address two research questions: (1) Can an autonomous robot designed with empathic competencies foster collaborative learning in a group context? (2) Can an…
Efforts towards endowing robots with the ability to speak have benefited from recent advancements in natural language processing, in particular large language models. However, current language models are not fully incremental, as their…
This letter introduces ERRA, an embodied learning architecture that enables robots to jointly obtain three fundamental capabilities (reasoning, planning, and interaction) for solving long-horizon language-conditioned manipulation tasks.…
Conversational agents (CAs) embodied in speakers or chatbots are becoming very popular in some countries, and despite their adult-centred design, they have become part of children's lives, generating a need for children-centric trustworthy…
Recently, generative AI and reinforcement learning (RL) have been redefining what is possible for AI agents that take information flows as input and produce intelligent behavior. As a result, we are seeing similar advancements in embodied…
The rapid adoption of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in schools raises concerns about students' uncritical reliance on its outputs. Effective use of large language models (LLMs) requires not only technical knowledge but also the…
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…
Imitation plays an important role in development, being one of the precursors of social cognition. Even though some children with autism imitate spontaneously and other children with autism can learn to imitate, the dynamics of imitation is…
Spoken language is a convenient interface for commanding a mobile robot. Yet for this to work a number of base terms must be grounded in perceptual and motor skills. We detail the language processing used on our robot ELI and explain how…
Robots are increasingly entering the daily lives of families, yet their successful integration into domestic life remains a challenge. We explore family routines as a critical entry point for understanding how robots might find a…
Continual adaptation is essential for general autonomous agents. For example, a household robot pretrained with a repertoire of skills must still adapt to unseen tasks specific to each household. Motivated by this, building upon…