Jered Vroon

Delft University of Technology | TU · Department of Design Engineering

The increasing presence of artificial intelligence, automation, and robots in our daily lives leads to a shift from human-to-human interaction to human-to-machine interaction. To make these interactions safe and successful, considering the emotional component is fundamental for trust and acceptance. Incorporating the emotional component into intera...

Mobile applications and online service providers track our virtual and physical behaviour more actively and with a broader scope than ever before. This has given rise to growing concerns about ethical personal data management. Even though regulation and awareness around data ethics are increasing, end-users are seldom engaged when defining and desi...

What if a robot could detect when you think it got too close to you during its approach? --- Full info and a download link can be found on https://pure.tudelft.nl/portal/en/publications/detecting-perceived-appropriateness-of-a-robots-social-positioning-behavior-from-nonverbal-cues(f47717cc-3724-48ac-9589-fbf48fa4245f).html

What if a social robot could detect, from your body language, how you would like it to behave differently? We investigate how a social robot can find appropriate behaviour through the interaction, by reactively adapting its behaviours to social feedback cues. Or, in other words, by being responsive. We focus our work on social positioning behaviou...

How can a social robot get physically close to the people it needs to interact with? We investigated the effect of a social gaze cue by a human-sized mobile robot on the effects of personal space invasion by that robot. In our 2\(\,\times \,\)2 between-subject experiment, our robot would approach our participants (n = 83), with/without personal spa...

Social interaction with a mobile robot requires the establishment of appropriate social positioning behaviors. Previous work has focused mostly on general and static rules that can be applied to robotics, such as proxemics. How can we deal effectively and efficiently with the dynamic positioning common in social interactions, such as the leaning be...

Not getting enough sleep is detrimental to our health and productivity, yet we have difficulty to maintain consistent bedtimes. Technological solutions to this problem mostly focus on detecting sleep patterns and providing feedback on them. We felt there was an opportunity for a perspective that concentrates on one's subjective experience. We propo...

How can we generate appropriate behavior for social artificial agents? A common approach is to (1) establish with controlled experiments which action is most appropriate in which setting, and (2) select actions based on this knowledge and an estimate of the setting. This approach faces challenges, as it can be very hard to acquire and reason with a...

The Equilibrium Theory put forward by Argyle and Dean, posits that in human-human interactions, gaze and proxemic behaviors work together in establishing and maintaining a particular level of intimacy. This theory has been evaluated and used in Virtual Reality settings where people interact with Virtual Humans. In this study we disentangle the sing...

One requirement that arises for a social (semi-autonomous telepresence) robot aimed at conversations with the elderly, is to accommodate hearing problems. In this paper we compare two approaches to this requirement;(1) moving closer, mimicking the leaning behavior commonly observed in elderly with hearing problems,(2) turning up the volume, whi...

When a mobile robot interacts with a group of people, it has to consider its position and orientation. We introduce a novel study aimed at generating hypotheses on suitable behavior for such social positioning, explicitly focusing on interaction with small groups of users and allowing for the temporal and social dynamics inherent in most interactio...

TERESA is a socially intelligent semi-autonomous telepresence system that is currently being developed as part of an FP7-STREP project funded by the European Union. The ultimate goal of the project is to deploy this system in an elderly day centre to allow elderly people to participate in social events even when they are unable to travel to the cen...

In this paper we introduce the Regulated Reactive approach to robotics, which adds regulation (local control) to the existing Reactive Approach. Furthermore, we present a formal framework for structure-level descriptions of systems and relate those to hardware requirements. We prove that for any given behavior there exists a regulated reactive syst...

An influential model of how reinforcement learning occurs in human brains is the one pioneered by Suri and Schultz [6]. The model was originally designed and tested for learning tasks in deterministic environments. This paper investigates if and how the model can be extended to also apply to learning in stochastic environments. It is known that if...