67 Results Found

Robot navigation in indoor environments has become an essential task for several applications, including situations in which a mobile robot needs to travel independently to a certain location safely and using the shortest path possible. However, indo...

Humanoid robots are increasingly being utilized in various activities involving humans, as they can facilitate certain tasks and provide benefits to users. Humanoid service robots possess capabilities akin to human performance, often proving advantag...

The application of social robots is increasing daily due to their various capabilities. In real settings, social robots have been successfully deployed in multiple domains, such as health, education, and the service industry. However, it is crucial t...

This paper presents a study on the robotic harvesting of New Mexico type chile pepper, in a laboratory setting, using a five degrees of freedom (DoF) serial manipulator. The end-effector of the manipulator, a scissor-type cutting mechanism, was devis...

Speech comprehension can be challenging due to multiple factors, causing inconvenience for both the speaker and the listener. In such situations, using a humanoid robot, Pepper, can be beneficial as it can display the corresponding text on its screen...

This paper proposes an autonomous robotic system to prune sweet pepper leaves using semantic segmentation with deep learning and an articulated manipulator. This system involves three main tasks: the perception of crop parts, the detection of pruning...

Recent studies in social robotics show that it can provide economic efficiency and growth in domains such as retail, entertainment, and active and assisted living (AAL). Recent work also highlights that users have the expectation of affordable social...

Social robots represent a valid opportunity to manage the diagnosis, treatment, care, and support of older people with dementia. The aim of this study is to validate the Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) test administered by the Pepper robot equip...

In this work, we report on our attempt to design and implement an early introduction to basic robotics principles for children at kindergarten age. One of the main challenges of this effort is to explain complex robotics contents in a way that pre-sc...

This article presents interdisciplinary research on the social and technological aspects of interactions between older adults and the humanoid robot Pepper (SoftBank Robotics). Our case study is based on the regular meetings that are a part of an exp...

Recently, farmers of sweet pepper suffer from the increase of its unit production costs due to the rise of labor costs. The rise of unit production costs of sweet pepper, on the other hand, decreases its productivity and causes the lack of its farmin...

At present, picking Sichuan pepper is mainly undertaken by people, which is inefficient and presents the possibility of workers getting hurt. It is necessary to develop an intelligent robot for picking Sichuan peppers in which the key technology is a...

This study investigates user experiences of interactions with two types of robots: Pepper, a social humanoid robot, and Double 3, a self-driving telepresence robot. Conducted in a controlled setting with a specific participant group, this research ai...

This paper presents a rule-based methodology for dynamic viewpoint selection for maturity classification of red and yellow sweet peppers. The method makes an online decision to capture an additional next-best viewpoint based on an economic analysis t...

Students may encounter problems concentrating during a lecture due to various reasons, which can be related to the educator’s accent or the student’s auditory difficulties. This may lead to reduced participation and poor performance in th...

Robot engagement in healthcare has the potential to alleviate medical personnel workload while improving efficiency in managing various health conditions. This study evaluates the impact of robot-assisted education on knowledge acquisition and metabo...

To solve the problems of poor adaptability and large sizes of pepper harvesting machinery in facility agriculture to enhance the efficiency and quality of pepper harvesting and ultimately boost farmers’ income, several flexible end-effectors we...

This paper presents a more detailed concept of Human-Robot Interaction systems architecture. One of the main differences between the proposed architecture and other ones is the methodology of information acquisition regarding the robot’s interl...

The recent pandemic outbreak proved social distancing effective in helping curb the spread of SARS-CoV-2 variants along with the wearing of masks and hand gloves in hospitals and assisted living environments. Health delivery personnel having undergon...

For robotic harvesting of sweet-pepper fruits in greenhouses a sensor system is required to detect and localize the fruits on the plants. Due to the complex structure of the plant, most fruits are (partially) occluded when an image is taken from one...

The presented work is part of the H2020 project SWEEPER with the overall goal to develop a sweet pepper harvesting robot for use in greenhouses. As part of the solution, visual servoing is used to direct the manipulator towards the fruit. This requir...

Current harvesting robots are limited by low detection rates due to the unstructured and dynamic nature of both the objects and the environment. State-of-the-art algorithms include color- and texture-based detection, which are highly sensitive to the...

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a sound-driven robot quiz system that enhances fairness and engagement in educational human–robot interaction (HRI). The system integrates a real-time sound-based first-responder detection mechan...

Due to a shortage of labor, the harvesting of fruits and vegetables faces significant challenges. Soft robotic hands, adaptable to variable environments due to their high-curvature bending and twisting, have garnered widespread attention and usage. H...

Maintaining engagement is challenging in human–human interaction. When disengagements happen, people try to adapt their behavior with an expectation that engagement will be regained. In human–robot interaction, although socially interacti...

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the development of robotic systems for improving the quality of life of individuals of all ages. Specifically, humanoid robots offer advantages in terms of friendliness and ease of use in such app...

Although progress is being made in affective computing, issues remain in enabling the effective expression of compassionate communication by healthcare robots. Identifying, describing and reconciling these concerns are important in order to provide q...

This paper presents a study on enhancing human–robot interaction (HRI) through multimodal emotional recognition within social robotics. Using the humanoid robot Pepper as a testbed, we integrate visual, auditory, and textual analysis to improve...

The target recognition algorithm is one of the core technologies of Zanthoxylum pepper-picking robots. However, most existing detection algorithms cannot effectively detect Zanthoxylum fruit covered by branches, leaves and other fruits in natural sce...

This paper addresses the effects of visual reaction times of a turn around behavior toward touch stimulus in the context of perceived naturalness. People essentially prefer a quick and natural reaction time to interaction partners, but appropriate re...

To address issues such as leaf occlusion, misalignment of the harvesting robotic arm, and limited harvesting range in hillside chili fields, this paper designs an intelligent harvesting system based on 3D point cloud reconstruction and multi-mechanis...

Chili pepper (Capsicum annuum L.), a globally important economic crop, faces production challenges characterized by high labor intensity, cost, and inefficiency. Intelligent technologies offer key opportunities for sector transformation. This review...

Real-time detection of fruit targets is a key technology of the Xiaomila green pepper (Capsicum frutescens L.) picking robot. The complex conditions of orchards make it difficult to achieve accurate detection. However, most of the existing deep learn...

Technological progress has seamlessly integrated digital assistants into our everyday lives, sparking an interest in social robots that communicate through both verbal and non-verbal means. The potential of these robots to influence human behaviour a...

This paper presents the architecture of a multimodal human–robot interaction control platform that leverages the advanced language capabilities of ChatGPT to facilitate more natural and engaging conversations between humans and robots. Implemen...

Service robots that coexist with humans in everyday life have become more common, and they have provided customer service in physical shops around the world in recent years. However, their potential in effective sales strategies has not been fully re...

Automation in agriculture can save labor and raise productivity. Our research aims to have robots prune sweet pepper plants automatically in smart farms. In previous research, we studied detecting plant parts by a semantic segmentation neural network...

Studying interactions of children with humanoid robots in familiar spaces in natural contexts has become a key issue for social robotics. To fill this need, we conducted several Child–Robot Interaction (CRI) events with the Pepper robot in Polish and...

This paper addresses the formulation of an individual fruit harvest decision as a nonlinear programming problem to maximize profit, while considering selective harvesting based on fruit maturity. A model for the operational level decision was develop...

Background: Emotion recognition skills are predicted to be fundamental features in social robots. Since facial detection and recognition algorithms are compute-intensive operations, it needs to identify methods that can parallelize the algorithmic op...

The effect of camera viewpoint and fruit orientation on the performance of a sweet pepper maturity level classification algorithm was evaluated. Image datasets of sweet peppers harvested from a commercial greenhouse were collected using two different...

The great demographic change leading to an ageing society demands technological solutions to satisfy the increasing varied elderly needs. This paper presents PHAROS, an interactive robot system that recommends and monitors physical exercises designed...

Social robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we interact with technology, providing a wide range of services and applications in various domains, such as healthcare, education, and entertainment. However, most existing social robotics pl...

This paper describes an interactive storytelling system, accessible through the SoftBank robotic platforms NAO and Pepper. The main contribution consists of the interpretation of the story characters by humanoid robots, obtained through the definitio...

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have the potential to significantly advance the development and application of cognitive architectures for human–robot interaction (HRI) to enable social robots with enhanced cognit...

In recent years, the rapid development of robot technology means more kinds of robots appear in life and they are applied in different fields of society. Service robots are mainly used to provide convenience for human beings. Guide robots are a kind...

The ability of a robot to detect and join groups of people is of increasing importance in social contexts, and for the collaboration between teams of humans and robots. In this paper, we propose a framework, autonomous group interactions for robots (...

This study aimed to validate the Robot Acceptance Questionnaire (RAQ), a self-report instrument designed to assess user acceptance toward social robots. Originally structured around four theoretical domains—pragmatic, hedonic (identity and feel...

Robots have been proposed as intelligent technology that can support the independent living and health of older adults. While significant advances are being made regarding hardware and intelligent software to support autonomous actions of robots, les...

This article shows our work for developing an elder care platform for social interaction and physical and cognitive stimulation using the Pepper robot and Android OS as clients, based on the knowledge acquired on our long-term social robotics researc...