Adaptive Robot Behaviours in Spoken Human-robot Interaction

Abstract

In my final year seminar, I will overview some of the work we have developed on spoken interactions with social robots in multi-party settings. First, I will –briefly– discuss our initial research work related to the development of robot behaviours aimed at managing multi-party conversations in the context of second language learning. Secondly, covering most of the presentation, I will review recent collaborative efforts, including (1) exploring how nationality-coded accent and facial appearance influence subjects’ perception of social robots, (2) examining the role of a human moderator in shaping group discussions to inform similar agent behaviours in human-robot interaction (work developed during my research visit at TU Delft), and (3) developing turn-taking strategies in multi-party interactions with a virtually embodied agent, as part of my internship experience at Disney Research.