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The current spread of social and assistive robotics applications is increasingly highlighting the need for robots that can be easily taught and interacted with, even by users with no technical background. Still, it is often difficult to…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
For service robots to become general-purpose in everyday household environments, they need not only a large library of primitive skills, but also the ability to quickly learn novel tasks specified by users. Fine-tuning neural networks on a…
Shared control systems aim to combine human and robot abilities to improve task performance. However, achieving optimal performance requires that the robot's level of assistance adjusts the operator's cognitive workload in response to the…
This paper proposes a method to navigate a mobile robot by estimating its state over a number of distributed sensor networks (DSNs) such that it can successively accomplish a sequence of tasks, i.e., its state enters each targeted set and…
In order for robots to autonomously navigate and operate in diverse environments, it is essential for them to recognize the state of their environment. On the other hand, the environmental state recognition has traditionally involved…
Socially assistive robots have the potential to improve group dynamics when interacting with groups of people in social settings. This work contributes to the understanding of those dynamics through a user study of trust dynamics in the…
Emotion regulation is a crucial skill for managing emotions in everyday life, yet finding a constructive and accessible method to support these processes remains challenging due to their cognitive demands. In this study, we explore how…
The rise of connectivity, digitalization, robotics, and artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing our society and shaping its future development. During this technological and societal revolution, security has been persistently…
In order for robots to be useful, they must perform practically relevant tasks in the real world, outside of the lab. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive results for end-to-end robot control, it remains an…
Systems that give control of a mobile robot to a remote user raise privacy concerns about what the remote user can see and do through the robot. We aim to preserve some of that privacy by manipulating the video data that the remote user…
In partially observed environments, it can be useful for a human to provide the robot with declarative information that represents probabilistic relational constraints on properties of objects in the world, augmenting the robot's sensory…
Multi-robot exploration is a field which tackles the challenge of exploring a previously unknown environment with a number of robots. This is especially relevant for search and rescue operations where time is essential. Current state of the…
Spoken language interaction is at the heart of interpersonal communication, and people flexibly adapt their speech to different individuals and environments. It is surprising that robots, and by extension other digital devices, are not…
In this paper, we explore the design and use of conversational telepresence robots to help homebound older adults interact with the external world. An initial needfinding study (N=8) using video vignettes revealed older adults' experiential…
One of the challenges of telepresence robotics is to provide ubiquitous social-interpersonalimmersion. In order to achieve this, there is a need to understand and model the factors that wouldallow the users to control the transmission of…
Knowledge sharing is an important aspect in most meetings. Personal characteristics of some participants, such as their (in)ability or (un)willingness to take the floor, may have a negative effect on the quality of knowledge sharing; some…
Social robots need to understand the affective state of the humans with whom they interact. Successful interactions require understanding mood and emotion in the short term, and personality and attitudes over longer periods. Social robots…
Service robots are increasingly deployed in public spaces, performing functional tasks such as making deliveries. To better integrate them into our social environment and enhance their adoption, we consider integrating social identities…
Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical…