Research

Exploring the Potential of a Robot-Assisted Frailty Assessment System for Elderly Care

Frailty assessment plays a pivotal role in providing older adults care. However, the current process is time-consuming and only measures patients’ completion time for each test. This paper introduces a set of algorithms to be used in robots to …

What Would I Do If…? Promoting Understanding in HRI through Real-Time Explanations in the Wild

As robots become more integrated in human spaces, it is increasingly important for them to explain their decisions. These explanations need to be generated automatically in response to decisions taken in dynamic, unstructured environments. However, …

Sweet Robot O’Mine - How a Cheerful Robot Boosts Users’ Performance in a Game Scenario

The ability to impact the attitudes and behaviours of others is a key aspect of human-human interaction. The same capability is a desideratum in human-robot interaction when it can have an impact on healthy behaviours. The robot’s interaction style …

Gendered Human–Robot Interactions in Services

The outbreak of Covid-19 precipitated the use of service robots in customer-facing services as a replacement for employees to avoid human-to-human contact. However, this development has not resolved the debate as to whether robots should be …

User Interactions and Negative Examples to Improve the Learning of Semantic Rules in a Cognitive Exercise Scenario

Enabling a robot to perform new tasks is a complex endeavor, usually beyond the reach of non-technical users. For this reason, research efforts that aim at empowering end-users to teach robots new abilities using intuitive modes of interaction are …

Robot explanatory narratives of collaborative and adaptive experiences

In the future, robots are expected to autonomously interact and/or collaborate with humans, who will increase the uncertainty during the execution of tasks, provoking online adaptations of robots’ plans. Hence, trustworthy robots must be able to …

Social robot-delivered customer-facing services: an assessment of the experience

The ability to install social intelligence protocols in robots in order for them to exhibit conversational skills has made them ideal tools for delivering services with a high cognitive and low emotional load. Little is known about how this …

Does the personality of consumers influence the assessment of the experience of interaction with social robots?

In recent years, in response to the effects of Covid-19, there has been an increase in the use of social robots in service organisations, as well as in the number of interactions between consumers and robots. However, it is not clear how consumers …

Implications of Robot Backchannelling in Cognitive Therapy

The social ability of humans to provide active feedback during conversations is known as backchannelling. Recent work has recognised the importance of endowing robots with such social behaviour to make interactions more natural. Nonetheless, very …

Evaluating the Effect of Theory of Mind on People's Trust in a Faulty Robot

The success of human-robot interaction is strongly affected by the people's ability to infer others' intentions and behaviours, and the level of people's trust that others will abide by their same principles and social conventions to achieve a common …