44 accepted papers
This study develops dialogue robots that encourage users to talk with the other directly to promote relationship building among them. It is said that friendly relationships with others have a positive impact on mental health and that face-to-face communication is important for building friendly rela
Since robots are often disregarded in public interactions, many studies have examined how nonverbal cues and dialogue strategies encourage users to initiate engagement. However, the impact of robot “movement” remains insufficiently investigated. This study examined the psychological effects of movem
Since robots are often disregarded in public interactions, many studies have examined how nonverbal cues and dialogue strategies encourage users to initiate engagement. However, the impact of robot “movement” remains insufficiently investigated. This study examined the psychological effects of movem…
Self-esteem plays a crucial role in children’s psychological well-being and social development. However, traditional interventions cannot provide consistent and engaging support. Recently, game-based learning has shown promise in fostering self-reliance and social confidence. Notably, socially suppo…
Mainstream use of AI has enabled human-like conversations with machines. Despite the perceived naturalness of these interactions, they are limited to 2D screens. Androids offer us an opportunity to explore the third dimension, touch, with a human-centered approach. In this work we developed and eval
Service robots have demonstrated significant potential in retail environments, with research efforts increasingly focused on designing effective robot-customer interactions. However, the collaboration between service robots and human clerks is crucial for optimizing customer engagement in real-world
Self-esteem plays a crucial role in children's psychological well-being and social development. However, traditional interventions cannot provide consistent and engaging support. Recently, game-based learning has shown promise in fostering self-reliance and social confidence. Notably, socially suppo
As artificial intelligence and robotics advance, social robots are increasingly integrated into service domains, necessitating strategies to enhance user acceptance of their recommendations. Prior work has explored how gendered appearance influences user acceptance, yet the role of linguistic featur
Teleoperated social robots are becoming increasingly prevalent in society. To address the issue of their lack of influence, researchers have explored the use of multiple robots. Previous studies comprehensively investigated interactions with multiple robots, conducted web surveys, and revealed attri
This study investigates the feasibility of understanding conversation dynamics in multi-party interactions without relying on auditory cues, focusing on continuous eye gaze as a key non-verbal communication modality. Without converting gaze into binary features, the study aims to explore the richnes
With the widespread use of conversational robots, the study of their social influences, such as conformity, has become a pressing issue. Prior research involving robots has limited its focus to examining the conformity of robots that are in direct human presence. In this study, we investigated the i
Social robots are increasingly utilized across domains like education, healthcare, and elderly care. Research has examined how the robot's postures impact social perceptions, but few studies have investigated the effects of robots' bodily movements with dynamics gait variations on attributed authori
Facial mimicry is crucial for human-like robots in human-robot interaction. The challenge is that the high diversity of facial expressions proposes difficulties in programming a robotic face to mimic human facial expressions using traditional methods. In this paper, we present a data-driven method t…
Recently, teleoperation systems have been developed enabling a single operator to engage with users across multiple locations simultaneously. However, under such systems, a potential challenge exists where the operator, upon switching locations, may need to join ongoing conversations without a compl
Effective teleoperated avatar communication requires expressing social behaviors. Gaze behavior is one of the crucial social behaviors and includes reflexive reactions to the avatar’s surroundings and intentional responses to the operator’s speech and actions. Teleoperated avatars must have their ga…
In recent years, the potential applications of social robots in retail environments have been explored. Previous studies have mainly focused on the performance of a single robot and have rarely considered the use of multiple robots to recommend products. Although a previous study did investigate the
The prediction of dialogue acts (DA) labels on utterance-level in conversations can be treated as a sequence labeling problem, which requires context- and speaker-aware semantic comprehension, especially for Japanese. In this study, we pro-posed a hierarchical attention with the graph neural network…
Robots can tackle human–robot interaction (HRI) tasks through inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). However, offline IRL agents' performance is upper-bounded by experts. Limited demonstration fails to provide an overall picture of the environment, especially in real-world applications. To further en
Identifying intentions is a critical task for comprehending the actions of others, anticipating their future behavior, and making informed decisions. However, it is challenging to recognize intentions due to the uncertainty of future human activities and the complex influence factors. In this work,…
For human-robot interaction (HRI), it is difficult to hand-craft all the rules for robots owing to diverse situations. Therefore, inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is a potential solution that helps transfer human knowledge about interactions to robots. However, the feasibility of practically usi
As a type of body language, gestures can largely affect the impressions of human-like robots perceived by users. Recent data-driven approaches to the generation of co-speech gestures have successfully promoted the naturalness of produced gestures. These approaches also possess greater generalizabili…
Recent developments in conversational technologies have attracted researchers to study their applications in recommending items through conversations. It is considered that physical robots, rather than virtual ones, are effective in situations in which robots talk about items near participants. Howe
Successful cases of robot sales promotions have been increasing. Users tend to make purchases when robots properly interact with users. Most robot interactions/recommendations are created using specific products and locations within the context. Therefore, developers have to prepare a new recommenda
In this paper, we report on a field study in which we employed two service robots in a bakery store as a sales promotion. Previous studies have explored public applications of service robots public such as shopping malls. However, more evidence is needed that service robots can contribute to sales i…
One essential role of social robots is supporting human mental health by interaction with people. In this study, we focused on making people's moods more positive through conversations about their problems as our first step to achieving a robot that cares about mental health. We employed the column
Motivated by the fact that some human emotional expressions promote affiliating functions such as signaling, social change, and support, all of which have been established as providing social benefits, we investigated how these behaviors can be extended to Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios. We
In this paper, we propose an adversarial auto-encoder-based classifier, which can regularize the distribution of latent representation to smooth the boundaries among categories. Moreover, we adopt multi-instance learning by dividing speech into a bag of segments to capture the most salient moments f…
This letter addresses the effects of grip timing to express a robot's emotions to people while they are watching a video stimulus together. Past studies on human-robot touch interaction focused on the types of touch behaviors for expressing a robot's emotion, but timing factors have received less at
Social robots are used in daily life. One of the applications of social robots is as recommendation systems. Previous research has mainly investigated how persuasive recommendations can be improved by focusing on the non-verbal/verbal behavior of robots. However, to use robots as recommendation syst…
Social connectedness is vital for developing group cohesion and strengthening belongingness. However, with the accelerating pace of modern life, people have fewer opportunities to participate in group-building activities. Furthermore, owing to the teleworking and quarantine requirements necessitated
Pointing at a person is usually deemed to be impolite. However, several different forms of person-directed pointing gestures commonly appear in casual dialogue interactions. In this study, we first analyzed pointing gestures in human-human dialogue interactions and observed different trends in the u
This study investigated the effects of touch characteristics that change the strength and the naturalness of the emotions perceived by people in human-robot touch interaction with an android robot that has a feminine, human-like appearance. Past studies on human-robot touch interaction focused on un
In this study, we propose a semi-supervised learning model for decoding of the perceived difficulty of communicated content by older people. Our model is based on mapping of the older people's prefrontal cortex (PFC) activity during their verbal communication onto fine-grained cluster spaces of a wo
In this letter, we extend our recent results on prediction of the older people's perceived difficulty of verbal communication during a humanoid-mediated storytelling experiment to the case of a longitudinal conversation that was conducted over a four-week period and included a battery of conversatio
Hand gestures commonly occur in daily dialogue interactions, and have important functions in communication. We first analyzed a multimodal human-human dialogue data and found relations between the occurrence of hand gestures and dialogue act categories. We also conducted a clustering analysis on ges
Hiroshi Ishiguro gave a lecture to a group of young students. We employed CommU, the desktop social robot, to manage the questions and answers for the talk. We encouraged the students to ask questions anytime. Half of the classroom was told to ask questions by raising their hand while the other half…
This study addresses the pre touch reaction distance effects in human-robot touch interaction with an android named ERICA that has a feminine, human-like appearance. Past studies on human-robot interaction, which enabled social robots to react to being touched by developing several sensing systems a
We report results of the analyses of the effect of communication through a humanoid robot in comparison with in-person, video-chat, and speaker on frontal brain activity of older people during an storytelling experiment. Our results suggest that whereas communicating through a physically embodied me…
Surprise expressions often occur in dialogue interactions, and they are often accompanied by verbal interjectional utterances. We are dealing with the challenge of generating natural human-like motions during speech in android robots that have a highly human-like appearance. In this study, we focus
We propose a probabilistic model that generates nod motions based on utterance categories estimated from the speech input. The model comprises two main blocks. In the first block, dialogue act-related categories are estimated from the input speech. Considering the correlations between dialogue acts…
For a safe, natural and effective human-robot social interaction, it is essential to develop a system that allows a robot to demonstrate the perceivable responsive behaviors to complex human behaviors. We introduce the Multimodal Deep Attention Recurrent Q-Network using which the robot exhibits huma…
Locomotion on the rough and variable ground surfaces is crucial for robots to complete various tasks. Recent advancement in numerical computation allow such locomotive robots to manipulate in real environments using a model-based control framework. This approach is successful if the precise model it…
We are dealing with the problem of generating natural human-like motions during speech in android robots, which have human-like appearances. So far, automatic generation methods have been proposed for lip and head motions of tele-presence robots, based on the speech signal of the tele-operator. In t…
Conventional hybrid actuators can achieve a better force/torque bandwidth than a single principle actuator without losing back-drivability. However, hybrid actuators occupy space at least equal to the sum of the volumes of two or more actuators and multiple transmissions consisting of timing belts,…