Patrick Holthaus

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• Dr.-Ing. FHEA CEng
• Senior Research Fellow at University of Hertfordshire

This paper connects the two domains of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and safety engineering to ensure that the design of interactive robots considers the effect of social behaviours on safety functionality. We conducted a preliminary user study with a social robot that alerts participants during a puzzle-solving task to a safety hazard. Our study f...

Social signals are commonly used to facilitate the usability of humanoid robots. While providing the robot with an extended expressibility, these signals are often applied only in structured interactions where parts of the familiarization or farewell processes are disregarded in the evaluation. In order to establish the consideration of a more comp...

Recovery procedures are targeted at correcting issues encountered by robots. What are people's opinions of a robot during these recovery procedures? During an experiment that examined how a mobile robot moved, the robot would unexpectedly pause or rotate itself to recover from a navigation problem. The serendipity of the recovery procedure and peop...

We present a new typology for classifying signals from robots when they communicate with humans. For inspiration, we use ethology, the study of animal behaviour and previous efforts from literature as guides in defining the typology. The typology is based on communicative signals that consist of five properties: the origin where the signal comes fr...

For long-term deployment in dynamic real-world environments, assistive robots must continue to learn and adapt to their environments. Researchers have developed various computational models for continual learning (CL) that can allow robots to continually learn from limited training data, and avoid forgetting previous knowledge. While these CL model...

Trust plays a major role when introducing interactive robots into people’s personal spaces, which, in large part, depends on how they perceive the robot. This paper presents the initial results of an investigation into the perception of robot agency as a potential factor influencing trust. We manipulated a robot’s agency to see how trust would chan...

Assistive technologies and ambient assisted living (AAL) environments promote independence and safety at home, especially to vulnerable users such as older adults or people who are recovering after a hospital stay. To support these technologies, we present an approach to detect the presence of people in individual locations of the University of Her...

The significance of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is increasingly evident when integrating robotics within human-centric settings. A crucial component of effective HRI is Human Activity Recognition (HAR), which is instrumental in enabling robots to respond aptly in human presence, especially within Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) environments. Since...

Human activity recognition (HAR) plays a critical role in diverse applications and domains, from assessments of ambient assistive living (AAL) settings and the development of smart environments to human-robot interaction (HRI) scenarios. However, using mobile robot cameras in such contexts has limitations like restricted field of view and possible...

The use of assistive robots in domestic environments can raise significant ethical concerns, from the risk of individual ethical harm to wider societal ethical impacts including culture flattening and compromise of human dignity. It is therefore essential to ensure that technological development of these robots is informed by robust and inclusive t...

The management of heart failure and post-heart surgery has been a major interest in healthcare. The cardiac unit has improved over time, undergoing significant innovations to improve the quality of services and patient outcomes. Researchers play a significant role in progressing innovative solutions, from co-design and idea conception to conducting...

Continual learning (CL) has emerged as an important avenue of research in recent years, at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), to allow robots to continually learn in their environments over long-term interactions with humans. Most research in continual learning, however, has been robot-centered to develop c...

The use of assistive robots in domestic environments can raise significant ethical concerns, from the risk of individual ethical harm to wider societal ethical impacts including culture flattening and compromise of human dignity. It is therefore essential to ensure that technological development of these robots is informed by robust and inclusive t...

Personal companion robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering tailored experiences through per-sonalisation. However, using multiple communication pathways heightens the risk of inadvertent personal data exposure. This paper presents a novel communication policy designed to mitigate such risks by dynamically adjusting communicatio...

As social robots become integral to daily life, effective battery management and personalized user interactions are crucial. We employed Q-learning with the Miro-E robot for balancing self-sustained energy management and personalized user engagement. Based on our approach, we anticipate that the robot will learn when to approach the charging dock a...

This paper summarizes the structure and findings from the first Workshop on Troubles and Failures in Conversations between Humans and Robots . The workshop was organized to bring together a small, interdisciplinary group of researchers working on miscommunication from two complementary perspectives. One group of technology-oriented researchers was...

This paper examines some common problems in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) causing failures and troubles in Chat. A given use case's design decisions start with the suitable robot, the suitable chatting model, identifying common problems that cause failures, identifying potential solutions, and planning continuous improvement. In conclusion, it is r...

In order for society to fully realise the potential benefits offered by assistive robots, a number of ethical challenges must firstly be addressed. Crucially, it is important to enhance public understanding of the ways in which societal ethics can be used to formulate and guide the preferred behaviours of these robots, particularly in scenarios whi...

Continual learning (CL) has emerged as an important avenue of research in recent years, at the intersection of Machine Learning (ML) and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), to allow robots to continually learn in their environments over long-term interactions with humans. Most research in continual learning, however, has been robot-centered to develop c...

For long-term deployment in dynamic real-world environments, assistive robots must continue to learn and adapt to their environments. Researchers have developed various computational models for continual learning (CL) that can allow robots to continually learn from limited training data, and avoid forgetting previous knowledge. While these CL model...

With the recent increased development of deepneural networks and dataset capabilities, the Human ActionRecognition (HAR) domain is growing rapidly in terms of boththe available datasets and deep models. Despite this, there aresome lacks of datasets specifically covering the Robotics fieldand Human-Robot interaction. We prepare and introduce a newmu...

There is a major lack of diversity in engineering, technology, and computing subjects in higher education. The resulting underrepresentation of some population groups contributes largely to gender and ethnicity pay gaps and social disadvantages. We aim to increase the diversity among students in such subjects by investigating the use of interactive...

We present a new typology for classifying signals from robots when they communicate with humans. For inspiration, we use ethology, the study of animal behaviour and previous efforts from literature as guides in defining the typology. The typology is based on communicative signals that consist of five properties: the origin where the signal comes fr...

The Kaspar robot has been used with great success to work as an education and social mediator with children with autism spectrum disorder. Enabling the robot to automatically generate causal explanations is key to enrich the interaction scenarios for children and promote trust in the robot. We present a theory of causal explanation to be embedded i...

We present a paper looking at the accidental exposure of personal data by personalised companion robots in human-robot interaction. Due to the need for personal data, personalisation brings inherent risk of accidental personal data exposure through multi-modal communication. An online questionnaire was conducted to collect perceptions on the level...

The Trust, Acceptance and Social Cues in Human-Robot Interaction - SCRITA is the 5th edition of a series of workshops held in conjunction with the IEEE RO-MAN conference. This workshop focuses on addressing the challenges and development of the dynamics between people and robots in order to foster short interactions and long-lasting relationships i...

The design of natural human–robot dynamics is a key aspect for ensuring a successful and efficient lasting human–robot interaction (HRI). In particular, it is expected that a robot deployed in human populated environments not only needs to be able to successfully complete a task, but also needs to show social intelligence to engage people in effect...

This workshop aimed for a deeper exploration of trust and acceptance in human-robot interaction (HRI) from a multidisciplinary perspective including robots' capabilities of sensing and perceiving other agents, the environment, and human-robot dynamics. The workshop was held online in conjunction with IEEE RO-MAN 2021 (see https://ro-man2021.org/)....

This position paper aims to highlight and discuss the role of a robot's social credibility in interaction with humans. In particular, I want to explore a potential relation between social credibility and a robot's acceptability and ultimately its trustworthiness. I thereby also review and expand the notion of social credibility as a measure of how...

Human activity recognition is an important aspect of many robotics applications. In this paper, we discuss how well the RoboCup@home competition accounts for the importance of such recognition algorithms. Using public benchmarks as an inspiration, we propose to add a new task that specifically tests the performance of human activity recognition in...

Human activity recognition is one of the most challenging tasks in computer vision. State-of-the art approaches such as deep learning techniques thereby often rely on large labelled datasets of human activities. However, currently available datasets are suboptimal for learning human activities in companion robotics scenarios at home, for example, m...

Human activity recognition is an important aspect of many robotics applications. In this paper, we discuss how well the RoboCup@home competition accounts for the importance of such recognition algorithms. Using public benchmarks as an inspiration, we propose to add a new task that specifically tests the performance of human activity recognition in...

Mapping is a fundamental requirement for robot navigation. In this paper, we introduce a novel visual mapping method that relies solely on a single omnidirectional camera. We present a metric that allows us to generate a map from the input image by using a visual Sonar approach. The combination of the visual sonars with the robot's odometry enables...

Trust has been established to be a key factor in fostering human-robot interactions. However, trust can change overtime according to different factors, including a breach of trust due to a robot’s error. In this exploratory study, we observed people’s interactions with a companion robot in a real house, adapted for human-robot interaction experimen...

We investigated how a robot moving with different velocity profiles affects a person's perception of it when working together on a task. The two profiles are the common linear profile and a profile based on the animation principles of slow in, slow out. The investigation was accomplished by running an experiment in a home context where people and t...

This position paper discusses the safety-related functions performed by assistive robots and explores the relationship between trust and effective safety risk mitigation. We identify a measure of the robot's social effectiveness, termed social credibility, and present a discussion of how social credibility may be gained and lost. This paper's contr...

This work investigates how human awareness about a social robot's capabilities is related to trusting this robot to handle different tasks. We present a user study that relates knowledge on different quality levels to participant's ratings of trust. Secondary school pupils were asked to rate their trust in the robot after three types of exposures:...

Technologies that aim to achieve intelligent automation in smart homes typically involve either trigger-action pairs or machine learning. These, however, are often complex to configure or hard to comprehend for the user. To maximize automation efficiency while keeping the configuration simple and the effects comprehensible, we thus explore an alter...

The emergence of cognitive interaction technology offering intuitive and personalized support for humans in daily routines is essential for the success of future smart environments. Social robotics and ambient assisted living are well-established, active research fields but in the real world the number of smart environments that support humans effi...

The purpose of this Wizard-of-Oz study was to explore the intuitive verbal and non-verbal goal-directed behavior of naïve participants in an intelligent robotics apartment. Participants had to complete seven mundane tasks, for instance, they were asked to turn on the light. Participants were explicitly instructed to consider nonstandard ways of com...

The first workshop on embodied interaction with smart environments aims to bring together the very active community of multi-modal interaction research and the rapidly evolving field of smart home technologies. Besides addressing the software architecture of such very complex systems, it puts an emphasis on questions regarding an intuitive interact...

This doctoral thesis investigates the influence of social signals in the spatial domain that aim to raise a robot’s awareness towards its human interlocutor. A concept of spatial awareness thereby extends the robot’s possibilities for expressing its knowledge about the situation as well as its own capabilities. As a result, especially untrained use...

In this demonstration, a humanoid robot interacts with an interlocutor through speech and gestures in order to give directions on a map. The interaction is specifically designed to provide an enhanced user experience by being aware of non-verbal social signals. Therefore, we take spatial communicative cues into account and to react to them accordin...

This work-in-progress paper presents an on-line system for robotic heads capable of mimicking humans. The marker-less method solely depends on the interactant’s face as an input and does not use a set of basic emotions and is thus capable of displaying a large variety of facial expressions. A preliminary evaluation assigns solid performance with po...

In face-to-face interaction, humans coordinate actions in their surroundings with the help of a well structured spatial representation. For example on a dinner table, everybody exactly knows which objects belong to her and where she is allowed to grasp. To have robots, e.g. receptionists, act accordingly, we conducted an on-line survey about the ex...

Social interaction between humans takes place in the spatial environment on a daily basis. We occupy space for ourselves and respect the dynamics of spaces that are occupied by others. In human-robot interaction, spatial models are commonly used for structuring relatively far-away interactions or passing-by scenarios. This work instead, focuses on...

In this paper, we present a first step towards a typology of relevant signals and cues in human-robot interaction (HRI). In human as well as in animal communication systems, signals and cues play an important role for senders and receivers of such signs. In our typology, we systematically distinguish between a robot's signals and cues which are eit...

Social interaction between humans takes place in the spatial dimension on a daily basis. We occupy space for ourselves and respect the dynamics of spaces that are occupied by others. In human-robot interaction, the focus has been on other topics so far. Therefore, this work applies a spatial model to a humanoid robot and implements an attention sys...