REA F.

When manipulating objects, humans finely adapt their motions to the characteristics of what they are handling. Thus, an attentive observer can foresee hidden properties of the manipulated object, such as its weight, temperature, and even whether it requires special care in the manipulation. This study is a step towards endowing a humanoid robot...

The style of an action, i.e. the way it is performed, has a strong influence on interaction between humans. The same gesture has different consequences when it is performed aggressively or kindly, and humans are very sensitive to these subtle differences in others' behaviors. In this work we investigated how to endow a humanoid robot with...

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When transporting an object, we unconsciously adapt our movement to its properties, for instance by slowing down when the item is fragile. The most relevant features of an object are immediately revealed to a human observer by the way the handling occurs, without any need for verbal description. It would greatly facilitate collaboration to...

In social interactions, human movement is a rich source of information for all those who take part in the collaboration. In fact, a variety of intuitive messages are communicated through motion and continuously inform the partners about the future unfolding of the actions. A similar exchange of implicit information could support movement...

Implicit communication plays such a crucial role during social exchanges that it must be considered for a good experience in human-robot interaction. This work addresses implicit communication associated with the detection of physical properties, transport, and manipulation of objects. We propose an ecological approach to infer object...

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The high request for autonomous human-robot interaction (HRI), combined with the potential of machine learning (ML) techniques, allow us to deploy ML mechanisms in robot control. However, the use of ML can make robots' behavior unclear to the observer during the learning phase. Recently, transparency in HRI has been investigated to make such...

In the industry of the future, so as in healthcare and at home, robots will be a familiar presence. Since they will be working closely with human operators not always properly trained for human-machine interaction tasks, robots will need the ability of automatically adapting to changes in the task to be performed or to cope with variations in...

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Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was...

Human motion understanding has been studied for decades but yet it remains a challenging research field which attracts the interest from different disciplines. This book wants to provide a comprehensive view on this topic, closing the loop between perception and action, starting from humans' action perception skills and then moving to...

As social agents, we experience situations in which sometimes we enjoy being involved and others where we desire to withdraw from. Being aware of others' "comfort towards the interaction"help us enhance our communications, thus this becomes a fundamental skill for any interactive agent (either a robot or an Embodied Conversational Agent (ECA))....

A social robot that's aware of our needs and continuously adapts its behaviour to them has the potential of creating a complex, personalized, human-like interaction of the kind we are used to have with our peers in our everyday lives. However adaptability, being a result of a process of learning and making errors, brings with itself also...

A social robot that is aware of our needs and continuously adapts its behaviour to them has the potential of creating a complex, personalized, human-like interaction of the kind we are used to have with our peers in our everyday lives. We are interested in exploring how would an adaptive architecture function and personalize to different users...

Human interaction often entails lies. Understanding when a partner is being deceitful is an important social skill, that also robots will need, to properly navigate social exchanges. In this work, we investigate how good are human observers at detecting false claims and which features they base their judgment on. Moreover, we compare their...

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One of the fundamental prerequisites for effective collaborations between interactive partners is the mutual sharing of the attentional focus on the same perceptual events. This is referred to as joint attention. In psychological, cognitive, and social sciences, its defining elements have been widely pinpointed. Also the field of human-robot...

Interaction among humans does not always proceed without errors; situations might happen in which a wrong word or attitude can cause the partner to feel uneasy. However, humans are often very sensitive to these interaction failures and may be able to fix them. Our research aims to endow robots with the same skill. Thus the first step, presented...