Research

Social robot-delivered customer-facing services: an assessment of the experience

The ability to install social intelligence protocols in robots in order for them to exhibit conversational skills has made them ideal tools for delivering services with a high cognitive and low emotional load. Little is known about how this …

Does the personality of consumers influence the assessment of the experience of interaction with social robots?

In recent years, in response to the effects of Covid-19, there has been an increase in the use of social robots in service organisations, as well as in the number of interactions between consumers and robots. However, it is not clear how consumers …

Implications of Robot Backchannelling in Cognitive Therapy

The social ability of humans to provide active feedback during conversations is known as backchannelling. Recent work has recognised the importance of endowing robots with such social behaviour to make interactions more natural. Nonetheless, very …

Evaluating the Effect of Theory of Mind on People's Trust in a Faulty Robot

The success of human-robot interaction is strongly affected by the people's ability to infer others' intentions and behaviours, and the level of people's trust that others will abide by their same principles and social conventions to achieve a common …

The effects of gender and personality of robot assistants on customers’ acceptance of their service

The Covid-19 pandemic has stimulated the use of social robots in front-office services. However, some initial applications yielded disappointing results, as managers were unaware of the level of development of the robots’ artificial intelligence …

How do Consumers’ Gender and Rational Thinking Affect the Acceptance of Entertainment Social Robots?

In recent years, the rapid ageing of the population, a longer life expectancy and elderly people’s desire to live independently are social changes that put pressure on healthcare systems. This context is boosting the demand for companion and …

I Know How You Feel: The Importance of Interaction Style on Users Acceptance in Entertainment Scenario

In this article, we aim to evaluate the role of robots' personality-driven behavioural patterns on users' intention to use in an entertainment scenario. Toward such a goal, we designed two personalities: one introverted with an empathic and …

Introducing CARESSER: a framework for in situ learning robot social assistance from expert knowledge and demonstrations

Socially assistive robots have the potential to augment and enhance therapist’s effectiveness in repetitive tasks such as cognitive therapies. However, their contribution has generally been limited as domain experts have not been fully involved in …

Do I Have a Personality? Endowing Care Robots with Context-Dependent Personality Traits

Recent studies have revealed the key importance of modelling personality in robots to improve interaction quality by empowering them with social-intelligence capabilities. Most research relies on verbal and non-verbal features related to personality …

Automatic Learning of Cognitive Exercises for Socially Assistive Robotics

In this paper, we present a learning approach to facilitate the teaching of new board exercises to assistive robotic systems. We formulate the problem as the learning of action models using Boolean predicates, disjunctive preconditions, and …