This article presents the design of Iromec, a modular robot companion tailored towards engaging in social exchanges with children with different disabilities with the aim to empower them to discover a wide rage of play styles from solitary to social and cooperative play. In particular this paper focuses on expressiveness as a fundamental feature of the robot for engaging in meaningful interacti...

Human–Robot Interaction (HRI) has recently received considerable attention in the academic community, in labs, in technology companies, and through the media. Because of this attention, it is desirable to present a survey of HRI to serve as a tutorial to people outside the field and to promote discussion of a unified vision of HRI within the field. The goal of this review is to present a unifie...

This paper describes a robot control architecture supported on a human-robot interaction model obtained directly from semiotics concepts. The architecture is composed of a set of objects defined after a semiotic sign model. Simulation experiments using unicycle robots are presented that illustrate the interactions within a team of robots equipped with skills similar to those used in human-robot...

Gait rehabilitation using body weight support on a treadmill is a recommended rehabilitation technique for neurological injuries, such as spinal cord injury. In this paper, a new robotic orthosis is presented for treadmill training. In the presented design the criteria such as low inertia of robot components, backdrivability, high safety and degrees of freedom based on human walking are conside...

Human-robot interaction studies and human-human interaction studies often obtain similar findings. When manipulating high-level apparent cognitive cues in robots, however, this is not always the case. We investigated to what extent the type of agent (human or robot) and the type of behavior (honest or dishonest) affected perceived features of agency and trustworthiness in the context of a compe...

Human robot interaction is a very heterogeneous research field and it is attracting a growing interest. A key building block for a proper interaction between humans and robots is the automatic recognition and interpretation of gestures performed by the user. Consumer depth cameras (like MS Kinect) have made possible an accurate and reliable interpretation of human gestures. In this paper a nove...