human-robot interaction

IntelliMan, a new Horizon Europe research project coordinated by the University of Bologna, researches a world in which robots will be guided by artificial intelligence: they will move with us and interact with the environment, learning step by step how to adapt to the different circumstances in which they will operate.

Exposure to increased automation through robotics at work increases the risk of unemployment and decreases wealth accumulation, particularly for less educated households, finds new research from Frankfurt School of Finance & Management. 

 A University of Central Florida researcher has received funding from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to enhance the current understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) reasoning.

Humans are less forgiving of robots after multiple mistakes—and the trust is difficult to get back, according to a new University of Michigan study. Similar to human co-workers, robots can make mistakes that violate a human’s trust in them. When mistakes happen, humans often see robots as less trustworthy, which ultimately decreases their trust in them. 

Researchers at Kyoto University designed a shared-laughter AI system that appropriately responds to human laughter in order to build a sense of empathy into dialogue.

Researchers at the Robotics Institute (RI) in Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science have developed a new learning method for robots called WHIRL, short for In-the-Wild Human Imitating Robot Learning. WHIRL is an efficient algorithm for one-shot visual imitation. It can learn directly from human-interaction videos and generalize that information to new tasks, making robots well-suited to learning household chores.

In a paper published in the Canadian Journal of Recreation Therapy, University of Utah researcher Rhonda Nelson and graduate student Rebecca Westenskow developed a protocol for using robotic pets with older adults with dementia. The protocol uses a low-cost robotic pet, establishes ideal session lengths and identifies common participant responses to the pets to aid in future research.

Researchers at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) implemented a non-verbal Turing test that shows that people interacting with the humanoid robot iCub were not able to tell whether the robot was human-controlled or pre-programmed.

Tobias Kopp, akademischer Mitarbeiter von Prof. Dr. Steffen Kinkel, Professor an der Fakultät für Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik der Hochschule Karlsruhe (Die HKA) und Leiter des Instituts für Lernen und Innovation in Netzwerken (ILIN), verteidigte erfolgreich seine Dissertation und durfte sich anschließend über die seltene Auszeichnung „summa cum laude“ für seine Promotion freuen.

People are more comfortable talking to female rather than male robots working in service roles in hotels, according to a study by Washington State University researcher Soobin Seo.