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Research in child-robot interactions suggests that engaging in "care-taking" of a social robot, such as tucking the robot in at night, can strengthen relationships formed between children and robots. In this work, we aim to better…
Employing skin-like tactile sensors on robots enhances both the safety and usability of collaborative robots by adding the capability to detect human contact. Unfortunately, simple binary tactile sensors alone cannot determine the context…
General-purpose conversational AI chatbots and AI companions increasingly provide young adolescents with emotionally supportive conversations, raising questions about how conversational style shapes anthropomorphism and emotional reliance.…
Successful adoption of industrial robots will strongly depend on their ability to safely and efficiently operate in human environments, engage in natural communication, understand their users, and express intentions intuitively while…
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…
Emotions can provide a natural communication modality to complement the existing multi-modal capabilities of social robots, such as text and speech, in many domains. We conducted three online studies with 112, 223, and 151 participants to…
Unprecedented possibilities of quadruped robots have driven much research on the technical aspects of these robots. However, the social perception and acceptability of quadruped robots so far remain poorly understood. This work investigates…
When a robot performs a task next to a human, physical interaction is inevitable: the human might push, pull, twist, or guide the robot. The state-of-the-art treats these interactions as disturbances that the robot should reject or avoid.…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
Virtual borders are employed to allow humans the interactive and flexible restriction of their mobile robots' workspaces in human-centered environments, e.g. to exclude privacy zones from the workspace or to indicate certain areas for…
Incorporating empathetic behavior into robots can improve their social effectiveness and interaction quality. In this paper, we present whEE (when and how to express empathy), a framework that enables social robots to detect when empathy is…
Communicating the robot state is vital to creating an efficient and trustworthy collaboration between humans and collaborative robots (cobots). Standard approaches for Robot-to-human communication face difficulties in industry settings,…
Emotion regulation (ER) is essential to mental well-being but often difficult to access, especially in high-intensity moments or for individuals with clinical vulnerabilities. While existing technology-based ER tools offer value, they…
Apart from the coherence and fluency of responses, an empathetic chatbot emphasizes more on people's feelings. By considering altruistic behaviors between human interaction, empathetic chatbots enable people to get a better interactive and…
Good human relationships are important for us to have a happy life and maintain our well-being. Otherwise, we will be at risk of experiencing loneliness or depression. In human-computer interaction (HCI) and computer-supported cooperative…
While interacting with another person, our reactions and behavior are much affected by the emotional changes within the temporal context of the interaction. Our intrinsic affective appraisal comprising perception, self-assessment, and the…
Providing effective, personalized support is critical for helping students overcome conceptual difficulties in physics. However, established scaffolding methods, such as structured tiered support, are often too resource-intensive for…
Gestures are a natural form of communication between humans and can also be leveraged for human-robot interaction. This work presents a gesture-based user interface for object selection using pointing and click gestures. An experiment with…
As voice assistants (VAs) become increasingly integrated into daily life, the need for emotion-aware systems that can recognize and respond appropriately to user emotions has grown. While significant progress has been made in speech emotion…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…