human-robot interaction

In a virtual-reality study that sheds light on the intricacies of human-robot interactions, researchers have discovered that humans are capable of experiencing empathic embarrassment when witnessing robots go through embarrassing situations.

Sereact recently revealed PickGPT, a novel robotics transformer that merges Large Language Models (LLMs) with Computer Vision. This development paves the way for guiding robots using natural language, allowing anyone, regardless of their background knowledge in robotics, to interact with these machines.

San Francisco has seen an growth in protests by residents rise against disturbances caused by autonomous vehicles. A growing number of protestors have found an unusual method of expressing their discontent – by placing traffic cones on the hoods of these robotaxis, rendering them immobile. Their rallying cry is a defiant rejection of the emerging autonomous future, summed up in the phrase: “Hell no, we do not consent to this.”

Scientists found that students given a task by a social robot with a voice programmed to be engaging and inspiring performed better and were more creative than students who received the task from an identical robot with a flat voice.

A Cornell University-led experiment in which two people play a modified version of Tetris revealed that players who get fewer turns perceived the other player as less likable, regardless of whether a person or an algorithm allocated the turns.

Researchers at Oregon State University are part of a $5 million National Science Foundation effort to accelerate robotics research by making standardized humanoid robots available to the scientific community.

As robots increasingly become part of our lives and workplaces, researchers at the University of Florida are looking to the age-old interactions between humans and horses for insights into building effective working relationships between humans and robots. This way they try to identify principles for human-robot interaction that could improve how humans interact with autonomous vehicles and other forms of AI.

Last month, OpenAI launched its newest AI chatbot product, GPT-4. According to the folks at OpenAI, the bot, which uses machine learning to generate natural language text, passed the bar exam with a score in the 90th percentile, passed 13 of 15 AP exams and got a nearly perfect score on the GRE Verbal test.

A new study by the University of Florida’s Department of Biomedical Engineering has shown that the brain reacts differently when playing table tennis against a human versus a machine opponent. The study was conducted by Amanda Studnicki, a graduate student with extensive experience playing tennis, and her advisor Daniel Ferris. The researchers were interested in how the brain responds to high-speed, complex sports like tennis and table tennis, and how that response might differ when playing against a machine.

According to a new study conducted by Duke developmental psychologists, children perceive smart speakers like Alexa as more human-like than autonomous vacuums like Roomba. The study also revealed that children believe that it is wrong to harm either device, despite perceiving a difference in their intelligence.