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1. “Excuse Me, Robot”: Impact of Polite Robot Wakewords on Human-Robot Politeness

   Williams, T.; Grollman, D.; Han, M.; Jackson, B.; Lockshin, J.; Wen, R.; Nahman, Z.; Zhu, Q. (January 2020, International Conference on Social Robotics)

   While the ultimate goal of natural-language based Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) may be free-form, mixed-initiative dialogue,social robots deployed in the near future will likely primarily engage in wakeword-driven interaction, in which users’ commands are prefaced by a wakeword such as “Hey, Robot.” This style of interaction helps to allay user privacy concerns, as the robot’s full speech recognition module need not be employed until the target wakeword is used. Unfortunately, there are a number of concerns in the popular media surrounding this style of interaction, with consumers fearing that it is training users (in particular,children) to be rude towards technology, and by extension, rude towards other humans. In this paper, we present a study that demonstrates how an alternate style of wakeword, i.e., “Excuse me, Robot” may allay this concern, by priming users to phrase commands as Indirect Speech Acts 

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2. A robot for overground physical human-robot interaction experiments

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276980  

   Regmi, Sambad; Burns, Devin; Song, Yun Seong (November 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Ferretti, Gianni (Ed.)

   Many anticipated physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) applications in the near future are overground tasks such as walking assistance. For investigating the biomechanics of human movement during pHRI, this work presents Ophrie, a novel interactive robot dedicated for physical interaction tasks with a human in overground settings. Unique design requirements for pHRI were considered in implementing the one-arm mobile robot, such as the low output impedance and the ability to apply small interaction forces. The robot can measure the human arm stiffness, an important physical quantity that can reveal human biomechanics during overground pHRI, while the human walks alongside the robot. This robot is anticipated to enable novel pHRI experiments and advance our understanding of intuitive and effective overground pHRI. 

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3. Robot-generated Mixed Reality Gestures Improve Human-Robot Interaction

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-90525-5_69  

   Tran, Nhan; Grant, Trevor; Phung, Thao; Hirshfield, Leanne; Wickens, Christopher; Williams, Tom (January 2022, International Conference on Social Robotics (Brief Research Reports))

   We investigate the effectiveness of robot-generated mixed reality gestures. Our findings demonstrate how these gestures increase user effectiveness by decreasing user response time, and that robots can pair long referring expressions with mixed reality gestures without cognitively overloading users. 

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4. Developing Robot Prototypes to Explore Robot-Facilitated Family Routines

   https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI61500.2025.10974104  

   He, Xinning; Xu, Michael F; Cagiltay, Bengisu; Mutlu, Bilge (March 2025, IEEE)

   In this late-breaking report, we present our design process motivated to build tangible, cost-effective, child- and family-friendly social robot prototypes aimed to (1) support the practical needs of families, as well as (2) serve as a feasible research platform to mitigate technical and logistical challenges faced within conducting in-home HRI studies. We apply a research through design approach, combined with participatory design methods, to produce functional prototypes. In future work, we are preparing to continue improving prototype design by conducting (1) iterative co-design sessions with artists and product designers focusing on the hardware design, (2) iterative co-design sessions with families focusing on the interaction design, and (3) long-term technology probe studies in homes to evaluate the effectiveness of the technological platform. We aim to solicit feedback from the HRI community on our design process and prototype research platform. 

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5. Autonomous Multi-Robot Action Planning Through Controlled Robot Language

   https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-96-1151-5_33  

   Tran, Dang; Arefin, Minhazul; Zhang, Zhengchen; He, Hongsheng (January 2025, Springer Nature Singapore)