In the last years, considerable research has been carried out to develop robots that can
improve our quality of life during tedious and challenging tasks. In these contexts, robots …

Social robotics is a thriving field in building artificial agents. The possibility to construct
agents that can engage in meaningful social interaction with humans presents new …

Affective touch is a crucial element of early human development, social bonding, and
emotional support. Technically and socially difficult to study, it has received little research …

This paper provides a comprehensive introduction to the design of the minimally expressive
robot KASPAR, which is particularly suitable for human–robot interaction studies. A low‐cost …

Pleo is one of the more advanced interactive toys currently available for the home market,
taking the form of a robotic dinosaur. We present an exploratory study of how it was …

Probo is a huggable animal-like robot, designed to act as a social interface. It will be used as
a platform to study human robot interaction (HRI) while employing human-like social cues …

Social robots are thought to be motivating tools in play tasks with children with autism
spectrum disorders. Thirty children with autism were included using a repeated …

With advances in sensor and actuator design, intelligent computing techniques and
personal care robotics, today's robots hold promise as fully interactive, therapeutic human …

As a young and emerging field in social human–robot interaction (HRI), semantic-free
utterances (SFUs) research has been receiving attention over the last decade. SFUs are an …

This article presents a novel set of ten play scenarios for robot-assisted play for children with
special needs. This set of scenarios is one of the key outcomes of the IROMEC project that …