Tony Belpaeme

Ghent University/University of Plymouth · IDLab - imec/Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems

Touch can have a strong effect on interactions between people, and as such, it is expected to be important to the interactions people have with robots. In an earlier work, we showed that the intensity of tactile interaction with a robot can change how much people are willing to take risks. This study further develops our understanding of the relati...

The ability of an artificial interactive system to understand human values and align its actions and decisions with them is important and this is particularly salient in the home environment, thanks to the greater intimacy and more relaxed social structures in private contexts. The technical aspect of building value-aware social robots is further c...

Introduction: Socially Assistive Robotics has emerged as a potential tool for rehabilitating cognitive and developmental disorders in children with autism. Social robots found in the literature are often able to teach critical social skills, such as emotion recognition and physical interaction. Even though there are promising results in clinical s...

Tactile interaction plays a crucial role in interactions between people. Touch can, for example, help people calm down and lower physiological stress responses. Consequently, it is believed that tactile and haptic interaction matter also in human-robot interaction. We study if the intensity of the tactile interaction has an impact on people, and do...

Tactile interaction plays a crucial role in interactions between people. Touch can, for example, help people calm down and lower physiological stress responses. Consequently, it is believed that tactile and haptic interaction matter also in human-robot interaction. We study if the intensity of the tactile interaction has an impact on people, and do...

Understanding and modelling children's cognitive processes and their behaviour in the context of their interaction with robots and social artificial intelligence systems is a fundamental prerequisite for meaningful and effective robot interventions. However, children's development involve complex faculties such as exploration, creativity and curios...

Lack of motivation and low adherence rates are critical concerns of long-term rehabilitation programmes, such as cardiac rehabilitation. Socially assistive robots are known to be effective in improving motivation in therapy. However, over longer durations, generic and repetitive behaviours by the robot often result in a decrease in motivation and e...

jats:p>This article presents a discussion of the importance of power analyses, providing an overview of when power analyses should be run in the context of the field of Human-Robot Interaction, as well as some examples of how to perform a power analysis. This work was motivated by the observation that the majority of papers published in the proceed...

Embodied conversational agents (ECAs) are often designed to produce nonverbal behavior to complement or enhance their verbal communication. One such form of the nonverbal behavior is co-speech gesturing, which involves movements that the agent makes with its arms and hands that are paired with verbal communication. Co-speech gestures for ECAs can b...

While automatic performance metrics are crucial for machine learning of artificial human-like behaviour, the gold standard for evaluation remains human judgement. The subjective evaluation of artificial human-like behaviour in embodied conversational agents is however expensive and little is known about the quality of the data it returns. Two appro...

We explore the effectiveness of a dynamically processed incremental referring description system using under-specified ambiguous descriptions that are then built upon using linguistic repair statements, which we refer to as a dynamic system. We build a dynamically processed incremental referring description generation system that is able to provide...

User identification is an essential step in creating a personalised long-term interaction with robots. This requires learning the users continuously and incrementally, possibly starting from a state without any known user. In this article, we describe a multi-modal incremental Bayesian network with online learning, which is the first method that ca...

This article explores the rapidly advancing innovation to endow robots with social intelligence capabilities in the form of multilingual and multimodal emotion recognition, and emotion-aware decision-making capabilities, for contextually appropriate robot behaviours and cooperative social human–robot interaction for the healthcare domain. The objec...

According to the world health organization, cardiovascular diseases are a major cause of death worldwide. Cardiac rehabilitation programmes are dedicated to approach this problem and reduce mortality rates due to the presence of a second event. However, the adherence and motivation of patients to assist to these programmes is not the expected. Ther...

While earlier research in human-robot interaction pre-dominantly uses rule-based architectures for natural language interaction, these approaches are not flexible enough for long-term interactions in the real world due to the large variation in user utterances. In contrast, data-driven approaches map the user input to the agent output directly, hen...

While automatic performance metrics are crucial for machine learn-ing of artificial human-like behaviour, the gold standard for eval-uation remains human judgement. The subjective evaluation ofartificial human-like behaviour in embodied conversational agentsis however expensive and little is known about the quality of thedata it returns. Two approa...

Robots in Education is an accessible introduction to the use of robotics in formal learning, encompassing pedagogical and psychological theories as well as implementation in curricula. Today, a variety of communities across education are increasingly using robots as general classroom tutors, tools in STEM projects, and subjects of study. This volum...

Interacting with social robots has been reported as potentially beneficial for children with social communication difficulties, with one of the promising applications being the practising of social skills, such as joint attention. We present the analysis of attention skills in children with cognitive impairments over a series of Child-Robot Interac...

One of the most promising areas in which social assistive robotics has been introduced is therapeutic intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders (CwASD). Even though there are promising results in therapeutic contexts, there is a lack of guidelines on how to select the appropriate robot and how to design and implement the child–robot...

What are the benefits of using a socially assistive robot for long-term cardiac rehabilitation? To answer this question we designed and conducted a real-world long-term study, in collaboration with medical specialists, at the Fundación Cardioinfantil-Instituto de Cardiología clinic (Bogotá, Colombia) lasting 2.5 years. The study took place within t...

Embodied Conversational Agents (ECA) take on different forms, including virtual avatars or physical agents, such as a humanoid robot. ECAs are often designed to produce nonverbal behaviour to complement or enhance its verbal communication. One form of nonverbal behaviour is co-speech gesturing, which involves movements that the agent makes with its...

Empirical evidence has shown that peer pressure can impact human risk-taking behavior. With robots becoming ever more present in a range of human settings, it is crucial to examine whether robots can have a similar impact. Using the balloon analogue risk task (BART) participants’ risk-taking behavior was measured either when alone, in the presence...

Therapy with robotic tools is a promising way to help improve verbal and nonverbal communication in children. The robotic tools are able to increase aspects such as eye contact and the ability to follow instructions and to empathize with others. This work presents the design methodology, development, and experimental validation of a novel social ro...

We present a dataset of behavioral data recorded from 61 children diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). The data was collected during a large-scale evaluation of Robot Enhanced Therapy (RET). The dataset covers over 3000 therapy sessions and more than 300 hours of therapy. Half of the children interacted with the social robot NAO supervise...

As the field of Human-Robot Interaction is relatively young and highly interdisciplinary, it often happens that we as researchers make mistakes which could have been avoided had we known more about good and bad research practices in fields other than our own. Bad practices such as convenience sampling, p-hacking, or the Hawthorne effect will be kno...

Earlier research has shown that robots can provoke social responses in people, and that robots often elicit compliance. In this paper we discuss three proof of concept studies in which we explore the possibility of robots being hacked and taken over by others with the explicit purpose of using the robot’s social capabilities. Three scenarios are ex...

The role of robots in society keeps expanding and diversifying, bringing with it a host of issues surrounding the relationship between robots and humans. This introduction to human-robot interaction (HRI), written by leading researchers in this developing field, is the first to provide a broad overview of the multidisciplinary topics central to mod...

Striking the right balance between robot autonomy and human control is a core challenge in social robotics, in both technical and ethical terms. On the one hand, extended robot autonomy offers the potential for increased human productivity and for the off-loading of physical and cognitive tasks. On the other hand, making the most of human technical...

Experts from a range of disciplines explore how humans and artificial agents can quickly learn completely new tasks through natural interactions with each other. Humans are not limited to a fixed set of innate or preprogrammed tasks. We learn quickly through language and other forms of natural interaction, and we improve our performance and teach o...

The past few decades has seen increased interest in the application of social robots to interventions for Autism Spectrum Disorder as behavioural coaches [4]. We consider that robots embedded in therapies could also provide quantitative diagnostic information by observing patient behaviours. The social nature of ASD symptoms means that, to achieve...

In this paper, we present a user study on generated beat gestures for humanoid agents. It has been shown that Human-Robot Interaction can be improved by including communicative non-verbal behavior, such as arm gestures. Beat gestures are one of the four types of arm gestures, and are known to be used for emphasizing parts of speech. In our user stu...

Generating spatial referring expressions is key to allowing robots to communicate with people in an environment. The focus of most algorithms for generation is to create a non-ambiguous description, and how best to deal with the combination explosion this can create in a complex environment. However, this is not how people naturally communicate. Hu...

Robot-assisted therapy (RAT) offers potential advantages for improving the social skills of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). This article provides an overview of the developed technology and clinical results of the EC-FP7-funded Development of Robot-Enhanced therapy for children with AutisM spectrum disorders (DREAM) project, which a...

In recent years, the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has seen an increasing demand for technologies that can recognize and adapt to human behaviors and internal states (e.g., emotions and intentions). Psychological research suggests that human movements are important for inferring internal states. There is, however, a need to better understa...

We present a large-scale study of a series of seven lessons designed to help young children learn English vocabulary as a foreign language using a social robot. The experiment was designed to investigate 1) the effectiveness of a social robot teaching children new words over the course of multiple interactions (supported by a tablet), 2) the added...