Integrating robotics into everyday scenarios like tutoring or physical training requires robots capable of adaptive, socially engaging, and goal-oriented interactions. While Large Language Models show promise in human-like communication, their standalone use is hindered by memory constraints and contextual incoherence. This work presents a multimodal, cognitively inspired framework that enhances LLM-based autonomous decision-making in social and task-oriented Human-Robot Interaction. Specifically, we develop an LLM-based agent for a robot trainer, balancing social conversation with task guidance and goal-driven motivation. To further enhance autonomy and personalization, we introduce a memory system for selecting, storing and retrieving experiences, facilitating generalized reasoning based on knowledge built across different interactions. A preliminary HRI user study and offline experiments with a synthetic dataset validate our approach, demonstrating the system’s ability to manage complex interactions, autonomously drive training tasks, and build and retrieve contextual memories, advancing socially intelligent robotics.

The addressee estimation (understanding to whom somebody is talking) is a fundamental task for human activity recognition in multi-party conversation scenarios. Specifically, in the field of human–robot interaction, it becomes even more crucial to enable social robots to participate in such interactive contexts. However, it is usually implemented as a binary classification task , restricting the robot’s capability to estimate whether it was addressed or not, which limits its interactive skills. For a social robot to gain the trust of humans, it is also important to manifest a certain level of transparency and explainability. Explainable artificial intelligence thus plays a significant role in the current machine learning applications and models, to provide explanations for their decisions besides excellent performance. In our work, we (a) present an addressee estimation model with improved performance in comparison with the previous state-of-the-art; (b) further modify this model to include inherently explainable attention-based segments; (c) implement the explainable addressee estimation as part of a modular cognitive architecture for multi-party conversation in an iCub robot; (d) validate the real-time performance of the explainable model in multi-party human–robot interaction; (e) propose several ways to incorporate explainability and transparency in the aforementioned architecture; and (f) perform an online user study to analyze the effect of various explanations on how human participants perceive the robot.

Social robots are expected to become more and more used in the education field. However, in the interaction between children and social robots, how robots are perceived in social contexts is still under investigation. In this exploratory study, we aimed to investigate how children’s expectations and demographical characteristics (N= 53, 9-14 years old) influence their perception of robot NAO during an education training program in schools. MANCOVA analysis conducted over questionnaire data indicates a positive correlation between the acceptance of the robot and the enjoyment of interacting with it. We found evidence that the more students accepted the robot, the more they perceived the group environment positively. Through a Correspondence Analysis, we investigate which are the preferred features of a robot according to the age of participants. The study suggests that a better opinion of robotics is a factor that can improve the learning environment in this specific context. Our exploratory study encourages conducting studies in-the-wild using self-reported measures to understand the implication of Child-Robot Interaction better.

Recognizing human partners is an essential social skill for building personalized and long-term human-robot interactions. However, robots deployed in complex, real-world environments have to face several challenges, such as managing unstructured interactions with multiple users, limited computational resources, and intrinsic and continuous variability of their sensory evidence. To cope with these challenges, we propose a framework to perform autonomous incremental learning for open-set face recognition suitable for unconstrained HRI scenarios. We validated the proposed framework in a real-world experiment, demonstrating its suitability to let the robot autonomously interact with multiple people while creating a labeled database of their faces across various encounters. Furthermore, we evaluated how an off-the-shelf model performed with data gathered from the HRI setting and proposed a fine-tuned model obtained with a transfer learning technique. Analyses about automatic threshold determination and rehearsal methods for memory sampling were also proposed. Our preliminary results suggest that exploiting the first-hand robot's experience could be crucial to ensure better models' performance and, therefore, could be advantageous for the acceptance and effectiveness of social robots in the long run. With this work, we aim to provide insights on continual learning approaches in the HRI field to promote autonomous and personalized solutions meaningful for real-world applications.

Successful, enjoyable group interactions are important in public and personal contexts, especially for teenagers whose peer groups are important for self-identity and self-esteem. Social robots seemingly have the potential to positively shape group interactions, but it seems difficult to effect such impact by designing robot behaviors solely based on related (human interaction) literature. In this article, we take a user-centered approach to explore how teenagers envisage a social robot "group assistant". We engaged 16 teenagers in focus groups, interviews, and robot testing to capture their views and reflections about robots for groups. Over the course of a two-week summer school, participants co-designed the action space for such a robot and experienced working with/wizarding it for 10+ hours. This experience further altered and deepened their insights into using robots as group assistants. We report results regarding teenagers’ views on the applicability and use of a robot group assistant, how these expectations evolved throughout the study, and their repeat interactions with the robot. Our results indicate that each group moves on a spectrum of need for the robot, reflected in use of the robot more (or less) for ice-breaking, turn-taking, and fun-making as the situation demanded.

The ability to recognize human partners is an important social skill to build personalized and long-term Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). However, in HRI contexts, unfolding in ever-changing and realistic environments, the identification problem presents still significant challenges. Possible solutions consist of relying on a multimodal approach and making robots learn from their first-hand sensory data. To this aim, we propose a framework to allow robots to autonomously organize their sensory experience into a structured dataset suitable for person recognition during a multiparty interaction. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach and show that it is a promising solution in the quest of making robots more autonomous in their learning process.

Skilled motor behavior is critical in many human daily life activities and professions. The design of robots that can effectively teach motor skills is an important challenge in the robotics field. In particular, it is important to understand whether the involvement in the training of a robot exhibiting social behaviors impacts on the learning and the experience of the human pupils. In this study, we addressed this question and we asked participants to learn a complex task - stabilizing an inverted pendulum - by training with physical assistance provided by a robotic manipulandum, the Wristbot. One group of participants performed the training only using the Wristbot, whereas for another group the same physical assistance was attributed to the humanoid robot iCub, who played the role of an expert trainer and exhibited also some social behaviors. The results obtained show that participants of both groups effectively acquired the skill by leveraging the physical assistance, as they significantly improved their stabilization performance even when the assistance was removed. Moreover, learning in a context of interaction with a humanoid robot assistant led subjects to increased motivation and more enjoyable training experience, without negative effects on attention and perceived effort. With the experimental approach presented in this study, it is possible to investigate the relative contribution of haptic and social signals in the context of motor learning mediated by human-robot interaction, with the aim of developing effective robot trainers.