Miracle-dz/UniFAR-FTUs huggingface dataset:
Technical Transparency for Robot Navigation Through AR Visualizations

Since robots can facilitate our everyday life by assisting us in basic tasks, they are continuously integrated into our life. However, for a robot to establish itself, a user must accept and trust its doing. As the saying goes, you don't trust things you don't understand. Therefore, the base hypothesis of this paper is that providing technical transparency for users can increase understanding of the robot architecture and its behaviors as well as trust and acceptance towards it. In this work, we aim to improve a robot's understanding, trust, and acceptance by displaying transparent visualizations of its intention and perception in augmented reality. We conducted a user study where robot navigation with certain interruptions was demonstrated to two groups. The first group did not have AR visualizations displayed during the first demonstration; in the second demonstration, the visualizations were shown. The second group had the visualizations displayed throughout only one demonstration. Results showed that understanding increased with AR visualizations when prior knowledge had been gained in previous demonstrations.
RoPi: Robotic Assistant for the Emotional Support of Hospitalized Children for Burns

Injury burns are traumatic events, especially for children. The use of combined pharmacological and non-pharmacological strategies in hospitals favor emotional experiences. However, in Latin American hospitals, which have low budgets, it is not possible to hire therapeutic support personnel, such as clowns, due to the lack of available human resources. RoPi is a social robot created to assist hospitalized children's emotional support through its multicolor interchangeable pieces and its interactive functions.
Investigating the Potential of Life-like Haptic Cues for Socially Assistive Care Robots

Physical touch (e.g., hugging, holding hands, petting an animal) plays a fundamental role in the provision of socio-emotional support. Touch-based interactions should thus be considered for socially assistive robots designed to provide similar support. However, the haptic properties of currently existing robots are limited. While research has shown possibilities of integrating life-like haptic cues (e.g., thermal, vibrotactile, pressure cues) into robotic interfaces, current understanding of user experiences with life-like haptic cues delivered by a robot, and their potential to regulate user affect, is insufficient. The current and proposed works investigate whether integrating life-like haptic cues into Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) can enhance the socio-emotional support provided by socially assistive robots and improve the relationships with, and perceptions of such robots. The findings of this work will provide insights into user experiences of touching a socially assistive robot and their perceptions of life-like haptic cues. The contributions will provide concrete design suggestions on how haptic cues can be integrated into interfaces of socially assistive robots to enhance users' well-being during stress-inducing situations
Intelligent Disobedience: A Novel Approach for Preventing Human Induced Interaction Failures in Robot Teleoperation

Failures are natural and unavoidable events in any form of interaction, especially in human-robot interactions (HRI). Throughout the literature, the definition and classification of failures are diverse, depending on the source and application domain. However, the tolerance to the aftereffect of these failures is low in teleoperation due to its unstructured application domains. One such type of failure is called human induced interaction failure. This is an interesting and often overlooked failure type, due to the perspective that robots are designed always to obey the instructions given by the human operators. Regardless of the degree of automation that the robot is equipped with. But what if the instructions provided are faulty, dangerous, or misleading. This paper addresses the above mentioned research gap. It introduces a framework based on the concept of Intelligent Disobedience (ID), derived from guide dog training methods, to manage human induced interaction failures in teleoperation scenarios.
Lying About Lying: Examining Trust Repair Strategies After Robot Deception in a High-Stakes HRI Scenario

This work presents an empirical study into robot deception and its effects on changes in behavior and trust in a high-stakes, time-sensitive human-robot interaction scenario. Specifically, we explore the effectiveness of different apologies to repair trust in an assisted driving task after participants realize they have been lied to by a robotic assistant. Our results show that participants are significantly more likely to change their speeding behaviors when driving advice is framed as coming from a robotic assistant. Our results also suggest an apology without acknowledging intentional deception is best at mitigating negative influences on trust. These results add much needed knowledge to the understudied area of robot deception and could inform designers and policy makers of future practices when considering deploying robots that may learn to deceive.
Design of Child-robot Interactions for Comfort and Distraction from Post-operative Pain and Distress

There are numerous strategies for reducing the stress and anxiety associated with pain that children experience before and after surgery. There is a potential communication barrier between hospital staff and the child which may result in inadequate pain management. Social robots may reduce the gap between the support that personnel can provide and what the children's emotional needs are. This study qualitatively evaluates the interactions between children and their parents who interact with the social robot MiRo-E. In the overall interaction, the robot would act like a pet and show different behaviours based on the estimated pain level of the children. However, in the current study, only the quality of the robot interaction behaviours was tested with healthy children and no pain was measured. During this study, two usability tests were done. Each usability test evaluated a different robot interaction. In both tests, children and their parents evaluated the designed interactions. Results indicate that children initially have different responses to the robot. They can either be held back from immediately interacting or they are not afraid of the robot at all and start touching it and interacting immediately. Although the intended behaviours could be more elaborate and personalized, both children and their parents appeared to like the different emotions shown by the robot and how it responded to their touch. The parents also offered some ideas to enhance the interaction between a child and a robot in a medical context, such as by including more sounds, making some behaviours more distinct, and allowing kids to customize the robot's look.
Hey Robot, Can You Help Me Feel Less Lonely?: An Explorative Study to Examine the Potential of Using Social Robots to Alleviate Loneliness in Young Adults

An often-forgotten group of people which is heavily affected by loneliness are young adults. The perceived social isolation often stems from attachment insecurities and social skill deficiencies. Since robots can function as social interaction partners who exert less social pressure and display less social complexity, they may pose a promising approach to alleviate this problematic situation. The goal would not be to replace human interaction partners, but to diminish acute loneliness and accompanying detrimental effects and to function as social skills coach and practice interaction partner. To explore the potential of this approach, a preregistered quantitative online study (N = 150) incorporating a video-based interaction with a social robot and qualitative elements was conducted. First results show that young adults report less state loneliness after interacting with the robot than before. Technically affine people evaluate the robot's sociability as well as the interaction with it more positively, people with a general negative attitude towards robots less positively. Furthermore, the more trait loneliness people report to experience, the less sociable they perceive the robot.
Robotic Gaze Drives Attention, Even with No Visible Eyes

Robots can direct human attention using their eyes. However, it remains unclear whether it is the gaze or the low-level motion of the head rotation that drives attention. We isolated these components in a non-predictive gaze cueing task with a robot to explore how limited robotic signals orient attention. In each trial, the head of a NAO robot turned towards the left or right. To isolate the direction of rotation from its gaze, NAO was presented frontally and backward along blocks. Participants responded faster to targets on the gazed-at site, even when the eyes of the robot were not visible and the direction of rotation was opposed to that of the frontal condition. Our results showed that low-level motion did not orient attention, but the gaze direction of the robot did. These findings suggest that the robotic gaze is perceived as a social signal, similar to human gaze.
SENSORS LOCATION FOR UPDATING PROBLEMS

Abstract In this paper two methods are proposed in order to determine the optimal or near-optimal positioning of sensors which has to be carried out when vibration tests are being prepared. The optimal sensors location is proposed on the finite element model associated to the structure to be tested. The general context concerns the parametric identification of mechanical structures models using test results. The purpose of model updating is to converge the mathematical model, generally obtained by a finite element method, by adjusting the model parameters in agreement with test measurements. Missing displacement measurements increase the ill-posedness of this problem. The dynamic response of the structure is here described on a truncated modal basis. The first method of location of sensors emphasises the minimisation of the noise effect, the estimate of the modal coordinates is found in a least-squares sense. The second method is based on the observability gramian and the optimal sensors location has to ensure observability requirements. The smallest eigenvalue of the observability gramian represents the poorest case of information. The two methods are illustrated for a supported beam for a benchmark truss structure.
What Does It Mean to Anthropomorphize Robots?: Food For Thought for HRI Research

Anthropomorphism is a well-used but vague concept that demands further understanding and clarification to be effectively used in HRI research. Although most HRI research defines and uses anthropomorphism as a human-like attribution process, there is lack of distinction between its deployment in design versus its manifestation in user response. Furthermore, researchers need to separate mindless from mindful anthropomorphism and find ways to theorize and measure each. Researchers also need to consider the dynamic and contextual nature of anthropomorphism to generate relevant findings for research as well as practice.
A Social Robot for Explaining Medical Tests and Procedures: An Exploratory Study in the Wild

Healthcare professionals often have little time to explain medical tests and procedures. Social robots capable of verbal dialogues may contribute to informing patients and the public in general about such tests and procedures, for example in general practitioner or hospital waiting rooms, nursery homes, as well as in public spaces. As an example of latter, an exploratory study was conducted at the Lowlands music festival in August 2022. A social robot explained a blood pressure measurement and a grip strength measurement to participants. Participants were asked to value the expected clarity of the explanation before the explanation, the experienced clarity after the robot explanation but before the actual physical measurements, and after the physical measurements. 172 participants completed the interaction (99 female, 57 male, 8 non-binary, 8 undisclosed). The mean interaction duration was 2.02 minutes (SD=0.40 minutes). Participants found the explanation after the interaction with Pepper clearer than they expected beforehand. Participants found the clarity of the explanation, after they had actually undergone the physical examination, even higher than before the physical examination. This study indicates that social robots are potentially useful to explain medical tests and procedures.
Save Baby Whale! A Pet Robot as a Medication Reminder for Children with Asthma

Asthma is one of the most common chronic diseases in children, but adherence to asthma medications is very low, which can lead to poor or even dangerous outcomes. To solve this problem, we came up with a baby whale pet robot that needs to be taken care of by children. In this paper, we present the design of our first prototype to explore whether a pet robot could help improve medication adherence in children with asthma.
Anomaly Detection for Dynamic Human-Robot Assembly: Application of an LSTM-based autoencoder to interpret uncertain human behavior in HRC

Human action recognition is one of the key challenges in human-robot collaboration (HRC), especially when the process has multiple valid ways to assemble a product. To address this problem, we developed an anomaly detection framework for the assembly of complex products. We used an Long-Short-Term-Memory (LSTM)-based autoencoder to detect anomalies in human behavior and post-process the output to categorize it as a green or red anomaly. A green anomaly represents a deviation from the intended order but a valid assembly sequence. A red anomaly represents an invalid sequence. In both cases, the worker is guided to complete the assembly process.
Effects of Predictive Robot Eyes on Trust and Task Performance in an Industrial Cooperation Task

Industrial cobots can perform variable action sequences. For human-robot interaction (HRI) this can have detrimental effects, as the robot's actions can be difficult to predict. In human interaction, eye gaze intuitively directs attention and communicates subsequent actions. Whether this mechanism can benefit HRI, too, is not well understood. This study investigated the impact of anthropomorphic eyes as directional cues in robot design. 42 participants worked on two subsequent tasks in an embodied HRI with a Sawyer robot. The study used a between-subject design and presented either anthropomorphic eyes, arrows or a black screen as control condition on the robot's display. Results showed that neither directional stimuli nor the anthropomorphic design in particular led to increased trust. But anthropomorphic robot eyes improved the prediction speed, whereas this effect could not be found for non-anthropomorphic cues (arrows). Anthropomorphic eyes therefore seem to be better suitable for an implementation on an industrial robot.
Enhancing Human-robot Collaboration by Exploring Intuitive Augmented Reality Design Representations

As the use of Augmented Reality (AR) to enhance interactions between human agents and robotic systems in a work environment continues to grow, robots must communicate their intents in informative yet straightforward ways. This improves the human agent's feeling of trust and safety in the work environment while also reducing task completion time. To this end, we discuss a set of guidelines for the systematic design of AR interfaces for Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) systems. Furthermore, we develop design frameworks that would ride on these guidelines and serve as a base for researchers seeking to explore this direction further. We develop a series of designs for visually representing the robot's planned path and reactions, which we evaluate by conducting a user survey involving 14 participants. Subjects were given different design representations to review and rate based on their intuitiveness and informativeness. The collated results showed that our design representations significantly improved the participants' ease of understanding the robot's intents over the baselines for the robot's proposed navigation path, planned arm trajectory, and reactions.
Considerations on irreducible cyclotomic polynomials

Originally irreducible polynomials were obtained essentially by checking the irreducibility of a randomly chosen polynomial. Recently, irreducible polynomials of a specified form have been produced and a transformation of the variable has been applied to produce a systematic method of deriving irreducible polynomials. In this paper, we consider irreducible polynomials from the viewpoint of cyclotomic polynomials. We define conditions for the existence of irreducible cyclotomic polynomials and show that these polynomials have some specified forms. Additionally, it is shown that an infinite number of irreducible polynomials can be generated which satisfy those conditions.
Social Bots that Bring a Strong Presence to Remote Participants in Hybrid Meetings

We've designed a social robot called SNOTBOX. The bot indicates the participation status (marginalized or not) of the remote participant using "Buzzo" and the remote participant's desire to be heard through a "Eureka". We used both representations to attract the attention of local participants as a way to enhance the presence of remote participants in the conference. SNOTBOX is low cost, easy to manufacture and supports diy participants' personalities, as well as being able to support multiple participants in online discussions.
Dancing with the Nonhuman: A Feminist, Embodied, Material Inquiry into the Making of Human-Robot Relationships

We propose that feminist reconceptualisations of agency and difference could dramatically expand our possibilities for both relating to robots in social scenarios and designing them as social agents. A performative approach to human-robot interaction favors the artefact's relational, participatory capacities over representational attributes to explore the meaning-making potential of human-machine couplings rather than the predefined meaning of an individual robotic agent. We discuss the feminist concepts of intra-action and diffraction and explore how they could expand our understanding of the workings of the interference patterns that characterize human-robot relationships. Our collaborative Machine Movement Lab project serves as a case study to look at the situated enactment of the subjects and objects that shape our human-robot relationships through the embodied lens of performance-making.
Using Justifications to Mitigate Loss in Human Trust when Robots Perform Norm - Violating and Deceptive Behaviors

Robots are increasingly being introduced in environments that require intimate and sensitive interactions with humans, ranging from robot caretakers in senior living facilities to medical assistants in hospitals, and as team members embedded in military operations. For robots to be trusted and accepted in interactions with humans, they must be aware of, follow, and prioritize the norms of the communities in which they will operate. This line of research aims to examine human perceptions of justifications presented by robots that exhibit norm-violating and deceptive behaviors. Across two studies, we examined human trust and moral blame ratings of robots violating social norms and the effects of justifications in mitigating initial perceptions. We aim to expand our research to emphasize deceptive robotic acts --- providing quantifiable evidence for the "deception objection" debate in social robotics literature.
Associative plasticity of granule cell inputs to cerebellar Purkinje cells

Granule cells of the cerebellum make up to 175 000 excitatory synapses on a single Purkinje cell, encoding the wide variety of information from the mossy fibre inputs into the cerebellar cortex. The granule cell axon is made of an ascending portion and a long parallel fibre extending at right angles, an architecture suggesting that synapses formed by the two segments of the axon could encode different information. There are controversial indications that ascending axon (AA) and parallel fibre (PF) synapse properties and modalities of plasticity are different. We tested the hypothesis that AA and PF synapses encode different information, and that association of these distinct inputs to Purkinje cells might be relevant to the circuit and trigger plasticity, similarly to the coincident activation of PF and climbing fibre inputs. Here we describe a new form of associative plasticity between these granule cell inputs, and show for the first time that synchronous AA and PF repetitive train stimulation, with inhibition intact, triggers long term potentiation (LTP) at AA synapses specifically. Furthermore, the timing of presentation of the two inputs controls the outcome of plasticity and induction requires NMDAR and mGluR activation. These observations reinforce the suggestion that AA and PF synapses are two synaptic populations with different coding capabilities and plasticity. Associative plasticity of AA and PF synapses enables effective association of information transmitted via granule cells.
Optical cooling revisited

The results of a recent experiment on the mechanical interaction of a bichromatic light beam with a single three-level ion serve to redefine laser cooling of ions in a trap and of atoms in standing light waves. Novel variants of light forces are demonstrated. They are caused by stimulated Raman-type two-photon transitions combined with spontaneous Raman scattering and by all-stimulated parametric interaction. These efficient processes parallel the generation of a stimulated light force in a standing wave and the operation of a free-electron laser, respectively. The latter force imposes no natural limit on the residual excitation energy of trapped particles.
Promoting diversity in ecological systems through toxin production

Toxin production is generally thought as a mechanism to increase competitiveness of the toxin producers over other strains, thus driving down the diversity in the system. However, the production of toxin would also incur costs to the producer, and thus the overall effect may not be one-sided. In this work, we investigate the regime in which the presence of toxins is required to maintain high diversity, either at steady state or at persistence where the strain abundances shows oscillations or chaotic behaviors. Complementary to cross-feeding, which is one of several mechanisms previously proposed to resolve the paradox of plankton, we suggest the regulation of toxin production could play a role in increasing diversity above the upper bound given by the competitive exclusion principle.
Integrated single-cell analysis defines the epigenetic basis of castration-resistant prostate luminal cells

Understanding prostate response to castration and androgen receptor signaling inhibitors (ARSI) is critical to improving long-term prostate cancer (PCa) patient survival. Here we use a multi-omics approach on 229,794 single cells to create a mouse single-cell reference atlas better suited to interpreting mouse prostate biology and castration response. Our reference atlas refines single-cell annotations and provides chromatin context, which, when coupled with mouse lineage tracing demonstrates that the castration-resistant luminal cells are distinct from the pre-existent urethra- proximal stem/progenitor cells. Molecular pathway analysis and therapeutic studies further implicate JUN/FOS, WNT/β-Catenin, FOXQ1, NFκB, and JAK/STAT pathways as the major drivers of castration- resistant luminal populations with high relevance to human PCa. Importantly, we demonstrate the utility of our datasets, which can be explored through an interactive portal (https://visportal.roswellpark.org/data/tang/), to aid in developing novel combination treatments with ARSI for advanced PCa patients.