Publications related to Robot ethics

A biohybrid interaction framework for the integration of robots in animal societies

Francesco Mondada, Daniel Burnier, Vaios Papaspyros, Raphael Cherfan

The collective behavior of animals has been traditionally studied through observation, quantitative models of behavior, and devices of low intelligence. Nowadays, the advancements in the field of robotics allow for closed-loop experiments that occur in rea ...

2023

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

Multi-modal deformation and temperature sensing for context-sensitive machines

Jamie Paik, Fabio Zuliani, Sagar Dattatray Joshi, Neil Chennoufi, Robert Lawrence Baines

Owing to the remarkable properties of the somatosensory system, human skin compactly perceives myriad forms of physical stimuli with high precision. Machines, conversely, are often equipped with sensory suites constituted of dozens of unique sensors, each ...

Nature Portfolio2023

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

Social/dialogical roles of social robots in supporting children's learning of language and literacy-A review and analysis of innovative roles

Barbara Bruno

One of the many purposes for which social robots are designed is education, and there have been many attempts to systematize their potential in this field. What these attempts have in common is the recognition that learning can be supported in a variety of ...

FRONTIERS MEDIA SA2022

Learning to Guide Online Multi-Contact Receding Horizon Planning

Sylvain Calinon, Teguh Santoso Lembono

In Receding Horizon Planning (RHP), it is critical that the motion being executed facilitates the completion of the task, e.g. building momentum to overcome large obstacles. This requires a value function to inform the desirability of robot states. However ...

IEEE2022

A game-based approach for evaluating and customizing handwriting training using an autonomous social robot

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

Handwriting learning is a long and complex process that takes about ten years to be fully mastered. Nearly one-third of all children aged 4-12 experiences handwriting difficulties and, sadly, most of them are left to fight them on their own, due to the sca ...

IEEE2022

Introducing Productive Engagement for Social Robots Supporting Learning

Jauwairia Nasir

We have all been one such student or seen such students who can maintain the 'good student' image while playing a video game under the table or those loyal backbenchers, seemingly always distracted, who then ace their exams. These intricacies of human beha ...

EPFL2022

A Case for the Design of Attention and Gesture Systems for Social Robots

Barbara Bruno, Utku Norman, Daniel Carnieto Tozadore, Romain Maure, Erik Alessandro Wengle

The success of social robots, even (or, especially) in use cases as simple as "manning" a booth to promote a product in a shopping mall, depends on their ability of interacting with humans in a timely, effective and enjoyable way. In this paper we present ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2022

Health data privacy through homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger computing: an ethical-legal qualitative expert assessment study

Marcello Ienca

Background: Increasingly, hospitals and research institutes are developing technical solutions for sharing patient data in a privacy preserving manner. Two of these technical solutions are homomorphic encryption and distributed ledger technology. Homomorph ...

BMC2022

A Noise-Resistant Mixed-Discrete Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm for the Automatic Design of Robotic Controllers

Alcherio Martinoli, Cyrill Silvan Baumann

The automatic design of well-performing robotic controllers is still an unsolved problem due to the inherently large parameter space and noisy, often hard-to-define performance metrics, especially when sequential tasks need to be accomplished. Distal contr ...

2022

Questioning Wizard of Oz: Effects of Revealing the Wizard behind the Robot

Pierre Dillenbourg, Pierre Pravin Oppliger, Barbara Bruno, Jauwairia Nasir

Wizard of Oz, a very commonly employed technique in human-robot interaction, faces the criticism of being deceptive as the humans interacting with the robot are told, if at all, only at the end of their interaction that there was in fact a human behind the ...

IEEE2022

What if Social Robots look for Productive Engagement?

Pierre Dillenbourg, Barbara Bruno, Jauwairia Nasir

In educational HRI, it is generally believed that a robots behavior has a direct effect on the engagement of a user with the robot, the task at hand and also their partner in case of a collaborative activity. Increasing this engagement is then held respons ...

2022

A Social Robot That Looks For Productive Engagement

Pierre Dillenbourg, Barbara Bruno, Jauwairia Nasir

In educational HRI, it is generally believed that a robots behavior has a direct effect on the engagement of a user with the robot, the task at hand and also their partner in case of a collaborative activity. Increasing this engagement is then held respons ...

2021

Combining robotics with enhanced serotonin-driven cortical plasticity improves post-stroke motor recovery

Silvestro Micera, Stefano Lai, Maria Pasquini, Sara Conti, Marco Mainardi

Despite recent progresses in robotic rehabilitation technologies, their efficacy for post-stroke motor recovery is still limited. Such limitations might stem from the insufficient enhancement of plasticity mechanisms, crucial for functional recovery. Here, ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2021

Strategies to modulate zebrafish collective dynamics with a closed-loop biomimetic robotic system

Francesco Mondada, Alexey Gribovskiy, Frank Bonnet

The objective of this study is to integrate biomimetic robots into small groups of zebrafish and to modulate their collective behaviours. A possible approach is to have the robots behave like sheepdogs. In this case, the robots would behave like a differen ...

2020

Robots for Learning - R4L: Adaptive Learning

Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal

The Robots for Learning workshop series aims at advancing the research topics related to the use of social robots in educational contexts. This year's half-day workshop follows on previous events in Human-Robot Interaction conferences focusing on efforts t ...

2019

Benchmarking Agility For Multilegged Terrestrial Robots

Auke Ijspeert, Peter Eckert

In this paper, we present a novel and practical approach for benchmarking agility. We focus on terrestrial, multilegged locomotion in the field of bio-inspired robotics. We define agility as the ability to perform a set of different but specific tasks exec ...

2019

CoWriting Kazakh: Transitioning to a New Latin Script using Social Robots

Pierre Dillenbourg, Thibault Lucien Christian Asselborn, Wafa Monia Benkaouar Johal

In the Republic of Kazakhstan, the transition from Cyrillic towards Latin alphabet raises challenges to teach the whole population in writing the new script. This paper presents a CoWriting Kazakh system that aims to implement an autonomous behavior of a s ...

IEEE2019