10 accepted papers
This work explores a novel approach to empowering robots with visual perception capabilities using textual descriptions. Our approach involves the integration of GPT-4 with dense captioning, enabling robots to perceive and interpret the visual world through detailed text-based descriptions. To asses…
The ROS 2 Navigation Stack (Nav2) has emerged as a widely used software component providing the underlying basis to develop a variety of high-level functionalities. However, when used in outdoor environments such as orchards and vineyards, its functionality is notably limited by the presence of obst…
The synergic orchestration of the cognitive and psychological dimensions characterizes human intelligence. Accordingly, carefully designing this mechanism in artificial intelligence can be a successful strategy to increase human likeness in a robot, enhancing mutual understanding and building a more…
The purpose of this research is to study the impact of robot participation in group conversations and assess the effectiveness of different addressing policies. The study involved a total of 300 participants, who were divided into groups of four and engaged in a dialogue with a humanoid robot. The r…
Cultural competence - i.e., the capability to adapt verbal and non-verbal interaction to the user's cultural background - may be a key element for social robots to increase the user experience. However, designing and implementing culturally competent social robots is a complex task, given that advan
Context-dependent meaning recognition in natural language utterances is one of the key problems of computational pragmatics. Abductive reasoning seems apt for modeling and understanding these phenomena. In fact, it presents observations through hypotheses, allowing us to understand subtexts and impl…
The way in which humans behave, speak and interact is deeply influenced by their culture. For example, greeting is done differently in France, in Sweden or in Japan; and the average interpersonal distance changes from one cultural group to the other. In order to successfully coexist with humans, rob…
The functionalities and behaviours of socially assistive robots for the care of older people are usually defined by the robot's designers with limited room for runtime adaptation to meet the preferences, expectations and needs of the assisted person. However, adaptation plays a crucial role for the…
The article proposes a solution allowing a multicopter to generate and follow a path while taking into account the obstacles in the environment.
Human Odometry (HO) is the process of providing a person with a continuous estimate of their location, on the basis of information acquired solely by sensors carried around by the person themselves. In an effort towards the development of effective and robust HO systems, we present the Human Odometr…