Abstract: Multi-robot teams can be very useful in wide variety of search and rescue missions in challenging environments. In a mission with considerable uncertainty due to intermittent communications, degraded information flow, and failures, humans need ...

Truly collaborative scientific field data collection between human scientists and autonomous robot systems requires a shared understanding of the search objectives and tradeoffs faced when making decisions. Therefore, critical to developing intelligent ...

The physical design of a robot suggests expectations of that robot’s functionality for human users and collaborators. When those expectations align with the robot’s true capabilities, users are more likely to adopt the technologies for their intended use. ...

Empathy is the ability to share someone else’s feelings or experiences; it influences how people interact and relate. Socially assistive robots (SAR) are a promising means of conveying and eliciting empathy toward facilitating human-robot interaction. ...

Affect-aware socially assistive robotics (SAR) has shown great potential for augmenting interventions for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). However, current SAR cannot yet perceive the unique and diverse set of atypical cognitive-affective ...

The growth of scale and complexity of interactions between humans and robots highlights the need for new computational methods to automatically evaluate novel algorithms and applications. Exploring diverse scenarios of humans and robots interacting in ...

Most people do not have direct access to knowledge about the inner workings of robots. Instead, they must develop mental models of the robot, a process that is not well understood. This article presents findings from a long-term, in-the-wild, ...

Trust in autonomy is essential for effective human-robot collaboration and user adoption of autonomous systems such as robot assistants. This article introduces a computational model that integrates trust into robot decision making. Specifically, we ...

In this article, we present a bi-directional communication scheme that facilitates interaction between a person and a mobile robot that follows the person. A person-following robot can assist people in many applications including load carrying, elder ...

Socially assistive robotics (SAR) has increasingly been shown to have potential as a tool for social skills therapy for children with autism, a developmental disorder associated with atypical social development. This work presents the results of a study ...

Human preferences of distance (proxemics) to a robot significantly impact the performance of the robot's automated speech and gesture recognition during face-to-face, social human-robot interactions. This work investigated how people respond to a ...

We present a socially assistive robot (SAR) system designed to engage elderly users in physical exercise. We discuss the system approach, design methodology, and implementation details, which incorporate insights from psychology research on intrinsic ...

Sensing and interpreting the user's activities and social behavior, monitoring the dynamics of the social context, and selecting and producing appropriate robot action are the core challenges involved in using robots as social tools in interaction ...