Publications related to Social robot

Biohybrid Superorganisms—On the Design of a Robotic System for Thermal Interactions With Honeybee Colonies

Francesco Mondada, Robert Matthew Mills, Rafael Botner Barmak, Raphael Cherfan

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where collaboration and division of labor enhance survival of the whole colony, and are thus considered “superorganisms”. Historically, studying behaviors involving ...

2024

A Biohybrid Superorganism - Investigating honeybees' collective behaviors via interactive robotics

Rafael Botner Barmak

Social insects, such as ants, termites, and honeybees, have evolved sophisticated societies where the collaborative efforts of "simple" individuals can lead to the emergence of complex dynamics. The reliance of each organism on the collective is so great t ...

EPFL2024

Soft robotics for farm to fork: applications in agriculture & farming

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kai Christian Junge

Agricultural tasks and environments range from harsh field conditions with semi-structured produce or animals, through to post-processing tasks in food-processing environments. From farm to fork, the development and application of soft robotics offers a pl ...

Iop Publishing Ltd2024

Teacher's Perception on Social Robots to Promote the Integration of Children with Migration Background

Arzu Güneysu Özgür, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore

This paper describes the first steps of an ongoing participatory design with teachers from Switzerland to co-create Human-Robot Interaction setups for integrating children with migration history. The herein presented phase had two main goals: (i) initially ...

Association for Computing Machinery2023

Immediate effects of short-duration wellbeing practices on children’s handwriting and posture guided by a social robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Chenyang Wang, Barbara Bruno, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Melike Cezayirlioglu

Handwriting practising, as any other repetitive task, often leads the practiser to an overconcentration state where their performance might be affected by postural and mental fatigue. Short breaks to perform unrelated activities, especially relaxation exer ...

2023

Participatory design of a social robot and robot-mediated storytelling activity to raise awareness of gender inequality among children

Barbara Bruno, Romain Maure

Gender inequality is a widespread problem in our society. It can manifest itself in many ways and contexts, and starting as early as primary school. While an increasing number of initiatives aim at tackling gender biases and inequalities, few of them are a ...

IEEE2023

Challenges and approaches in bridging the biomimicry gap in biohybrid systems of fish and robots

Vaios Papaspyros

As the field of ethology advances, especially over the past two decades, the role of animal-robot interaction tools has increasingly become essential. This importance arises from the need for controlled, repetitive, repeatable, and long-duration experiment ...

EPFL2023

Language Learning using Caption Generation within Reciprocal Multi-Party Child-Tutor-Tutee Interaction

Barbara Bruno

Reciprocal Peer Tutoring (RPT) is a learning paradigm characteristic of collaborative interaction between learners with alternating tutortutee roles. In recent years, robot-assisted language learning (RALL) has gained traction by its wide application for l ...

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY2023

Computational Models of Mutual Understanding for Human-Robot Collaborative Learning

Utku Norman

There is a growing trend towards designing learning activities featuring robots as collaborative exercises where children work together to achieve the activity objectives, generating interactions that can trigger learning processes. Witnessing such activit ...

EPFL2023

Geometric and Learning Methods for Robots to Navigate in Human Crowds with Application to Smart Mobility Devices

David Julian Gonon

The thesis at hand is concerned with robots' navigation in human crowds. Specifically, methods are developed for planning a mobile robot's local motion between pedestrians, and they are evaluated in experiments where a robot interacts with real pedestrians ...

EPFL2023

Beyond undulation! Body morphology and sensing components of elongated animals and robots reveal skills to maintain competent locomotion

Laura Isabel Paez Coy

Locomotion is an essential evolutive innovation of living beings that allows them to colonize and dominate the planet. As diverse as animal morphologies are (living) and were (extinct), their locomotion modalities are also diverse. In particular, animal mo ...

EPFL2023

VP-STO: Via-point-based Stochastic Trajectory Optimization for Reactive Robot Behavior

Sylvain Calinon, Julius Maximilian Jankowski

Achieving reactive robot behavior in complex dynamic environments is still challenging as it relies on being able to solve trajectory optimization problems quickly enough, such that we can replan the future motion at frequencies which are sufficiently high ...

IEEE2023

Haptics based multi-level collaborative steering control for automated driving

Hannes Bleuler, Jürg Alexander Schiffmann, Tomohiro Nakade, Robert Fuchs

Increasing the capability of automated driving vehicles is motivated by environmental, productivity, and traffic safety benefits. But over-reliance on the automation system is known to cause accidents. The role of the driver cannot be underestimated as it ...

2023

The science of soft robot design: A review of motivations, methods and enabling technologies

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Francesco Stella

Novel technologies, fabrication methods, controllers and computational methods are rapidly advancing the capabilities of soft robotics. This is creating the need for design techniques and methodologies that are suited for the multi-disciplinary nature of s ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2023

Human Interactive Robotic Surfaces for Physical Immersion

Fabio Zuliani

Computers have long been augmenting human capabilities and communication, and with emerging technologies, physical immersion in virtual worlds is now attainable. These advancements push the boundaries of human potential, allowing designers, architects, eng ...

EPFL2023

Implicit Distance Functions: Learning and Applications in Robotics

Mikhail Koptev

In this thesis, we address the complex issue of collision avoidance in the joint space of robots. Avoiding collisions with both the robot's own body parts and obstacles in the environment is a critical constraint in motion planning and is crucial for ensur ...

EPFL2023

A geometric optimal control approach for imitation and generalization of manipulation skills

Sylvain Calinon, Amirreza Razmjoo Fard, Jie Zhao

Daily manipulation tasks are characterized by regular features associated with the task structure, which can be described by multiple geometric primitives related to actions and object shapes. Only using Cartesian coordinate systems cannot fully represent ...

Elsevier2023

Self-Correcting Quadratic Programming-Based Robot Control

Aude Billard, Farshad Khadivar, Konstantinos Chatzilygeroudis

Quadratic Programming (QP)-based controllers allow many robotic systems, such as humanoids, to successfully undertake complex motions and interactions. However, these approaches rely heavily on adequately capturing the underlying model of the environment a ...

2023

Non-verbal Communication between Humans and Robots: Imitation, Mutual Understanding and Inferring Object Properties

Nuno Ricardo Ferreira Duarte

Humans can express their actions and intentions, resorting to verbal and/or non-verbal communication. In verbal communication, humans use language to express, in structured linguistic terms, the desired action they wish to perform. Non-verbal communication ...

EPFL2023

Accessible Soft Robotics Education with Re-configurable Balloon Robots

Josephine Anna Eleanor Hughes, Kieran Daniel Gilday, Yi-Shiun Wu

Soft robotics requires effective tools to educate the next generation of engineers and researchers. Stemming from a lack of universally accepted principles for education and with high barriers to entry in terms of fabrication and hardware, education to dat ...

IEEE2023