Large language models enable unscripted conversations while maintaining a consistent personality. One desirable personality trait in cooperative partners, known to improve task performance, is agreeableness. To explore the impact of large language models on personality modeling for robots, as well as the effect of agreeable and non-agreeable personalities in cooperative tasks, we conduct a two-part study. This includes an online pre-study for personality validation and a lab-based main study to evaluate the effects on likability, motivation, and task performance. The results demonstrate that the robot’s agreeableness significantly enhances its likability. No significant difference in intrinsic motivation was observed between the two personality types. However, the findings suggest that a robot exhibiting agreeableness and openness to new experiences can enhance task performance. This study highlights the advantages of employing large language models for customized modeling of robot personalities and provides evidence that a carefully chosen agreeable robot personality can positively influence human perceptions and lead to greater success in cooperative scenarios.

With the increasing performance of text-to-speech systems and their generated voices indistinguishable from natural human speech, the use of these systems for robots raises ethical and safety concerns. A robot with a natural voice could increase trust, which might result in over-reliance despite evidence for robot unreliability. To estimate the influence of a robot’s voice on trust and compliance, we design a study that consists of two experiments. In a pre-study ( \(N_{1}=60\) ) the most suitable natural and mechanical voice for the main study are estimated and selected for the main study. Afterward, in the main study ( \(N_{2}=68\) ), the influence of a robot’s voice on trust and compliance is evaluated in a cooperative game of Battleship with a robot as an assistant. During the experiment, the acceptance of the robot’s advice and response time are measured, which indicate trust and compliance, respectively. The results show that participants expect robots to sound human-like and that a robot with a natural voice is perceived as safer. Additionally, a natural voice can affect compliance. Despite repeated incorrect advice, the participants are more likely to rely on the robot with the natural voice. The results do not show a direct effect on trust. Natural voices provide increased intelligibility, and while they can increase compliance with the robot, the results indicate that natural voices might not lead to over-reliance. The results highlight the importance of incorporating voices into the design of social robots to improve communication, avoid adverse effects, and increase acceptance and adoption in society.

In order to mitigate midair collisions, a reliable and fast information exchange based on direct Drone-to-Drone (D2D) communication will be one key factor for the realization of Urban Air Mobility (UAM). However, the expected high-density traffic scenarios with highly mobile airspace users, combined with the fast-changing and rich multipath propagation channel characteristics of urban environments pose unique challenges for communication systems. Therefore, in previous work we proposed DroneCAST (Drone Communications and Surveillance Technology) as a first step towards a novel D2D communications and surveillance system tailored to the specific requirements of a future urban airspace. In this work, we present and discuss our design decisions on the physical layer of DroneCAST, which is based on considerations on the specific propagation characteristics of urban D2D channels. Furthermore, we evaluate the design by analyzing the impact of several transmission parameter with different communication channels from three different measured D2D scenarios within software simulations. Our simulation framework implements the physical layer of DroneCAST and simulates transmitting the physical waveform over different communication channels as well as considers nonideal real world effects of a transmission system.

Increasing anthropomorphic robot behavioral design could affect trust and cooperation positively. However, studies have shown contradicting results and suggest a task-dependent relationship between robots that display emotions and trust. Therefore, this study analyzes the effect of robots that display human-like emotions on trust, cooperation, and participants’ emotions. In the between-group study, participants play the coin entrustment game with an emotional and a non-emotional robot. The results showthat the robot that displays emotions induces more anxiety than the neutral robot. Accordingly, the participants trust the emotional robot less and are less likely to cooperate. Furthermore, the perceived intelligence of a robot increases trust, while a desire to outcompete the robot can reduce trust and cooperation. Thus, the design of robots expressing emotions should be task dependent to avoid adverse effects that reduce trust and cooperation.

Supervised masking approaches in the time-frequency domain aim to employ deep neural networks to estimate a multiplicative mask to extract clean speech. This leads to a single estimate for each input without any guarantees or measures of reliability. In this paper, we study the benefits of modeling uncertainty in clean speech estimation. Prediction uncertainty is typically categorized intoaleatoric uncertaintyandepistemic uncertainty. The former refers to inherent randomness in data, while the latter describes uncertainty in the model parameters. In this work, we propose a framework to jointly model aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties in neural network-based speech enhancement. The proposed approach captures aleatoric uncertainty by estimating the statistical moments of the speech posterior distribution and explicitly incorporates the uncertainty estimate to further improve clean speech estimation. For epistemic uncertainty, we investigate two Bayesian deep learning approaches: Monte Carlo dropout and Deep ensembles to quantify the uncertainty of the neural network parameters. Our analyses show that the proposed framework promotes capturing practical and reliable uncertainty, while combining different sources of uncertainties yields more reliable predictive uncertainty estimates. Furthermore, we demonstrate the benefits of modeling uncertainty on speech enhancement performance by evaluating the framework on different datasets, exhibiting notable improvement over comparable models that fail to account for uncertainty.

Recent developments in explainable artificial intelligence promise the potential to transform human-robot interaction: Explanations of robot decisions could affect user perceptions, justify their reliability, and increase trust. However, the effects on human perceptions of robots that explain their decisions have not been studied thoroughly. To analyze the effect of explainable robots, we conduct a study in which two simulated robots play a competitive board game. While one robot explains its moves, the other robot only announces them. Providing explanations for its actions was not sufficient to change the perceived competence, intelligence, likeability or safety ratings of the robot. However, the results show that the robot that explains its moves is perceived as more lively and human-like. This study demonstrates the need for and potential of explainable human-robot interaction and the wider assessment of its effects as a novel research direction.

The use of concurrent transmissions allows protocols to achieve high reliable, ultra-low latency communication in homogeneous wireless sensor networks. However, applications for wireless sensor networks must often operate over heterogeneous nodes. In this work, we provide a first step towards enabling concurrent transmissions in heterogeneous networks. We present a methodology to implement the Glossy communication protocol on a number of different hardware platforms. We further compare the performance of Glossy on two exemplary platforms -- the Tmote Sky and the WiSMote. We show that even small differences in the underlying hardware can influence the performance of Glossy significantly.