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“It’s important to think of Pepper as a teaching aid or resource external to the classroom”: A social robot in a school for autistic children (2022)
Journal Article
Lemaignan, S., Newbutt, N., Rice, L., & Daly, J. (in press). “It’s important to think of Pepper as a teaching aid or resource external to the classroom”: A social robot in a school for autistic children. International Journal of Social Robotics, https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-022-00928-4

For a period of 3 weeks in June 2021, we embedded a social robot (Softbank Pepper) in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school for autistic children. The robot’s behaviours and integration into the school were co-designed with the children and teache... Read More about “It’s important to think of Pepper as a teaching aid or resource external to the classroom”: A social robot in a school for autistic children.

Measuring visual social engagement from proxemics and gaze (2022)
Conference Proceeding
Webb, N., Giuliani, M., & Lemaignan, S. (2022). Measuring visual social engagement from proxemics and gaze. In 2022 31st IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN) (757-762). https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN53752.2022.9900801

When we approach a group, there is an exchange of a multitude of verbal or non-verbal social signals to indicate that we are looking to interact. We continue to share these signals throughout the interaction to portray our thoughts and motivations. W... Read More about Measuring visual social engagement from proxemics and gaze.

On determinism of game engines used for simulation-based autonomous vehicle verification (2022)
Journal Article
Chance, G., Ghobrial, A., McAreavey, K., Lemaignan, S., Pipe, T., & Eder, K. (2022). On determinism of game engines used for simulation-based autonomous vehicle verification. IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, 23(11), 1-15. https://doi.org/10.1109/TITS.2022.3177887

Game engines are increasingly used as simulation platforms by the autonomous vehicle community to develop vehicle control systems and test environments. A key requirement for simulation-based development and verification is determinism, since a deter... Read More about On determinism of game engines used for simulation-based autonomous vehicle verification.

UNICEF guidance on AI for children: Application to the design of a social robot for and with autistic children (2021)
Presentation / Conference
lemaignan, S., newbutt, N., Rice, L., daly, J., & charisi, V. (2021, September). UNICEF guidance on AI for children: Application to the design of a social robot for and with autistic children. Paper presented at IROS: The Roles of Robotics in Achieving the UN's Social Development Goals, Prague

For a period of three weeks in June 2021, we embedded a social robot (Softbank Pepper) in a Special Educational Needs (SEN) school, with a focus on supporting the well-being of autistic children. Our methodology to design and embed the robot among th... Read More about UNICEF guidance on AI for children: Application to the design of a social robot for and with autistic children.

On the impact of different types of errors on trust in human-robot interaction: Are laboratory-based HRI experiments trustworthy? (2019)
Journal Article
Flook, R., Shrinah, A., Wijnen, L., Eder, K., Melhuish, C., & Lemaignan, S. (2019). On the impact of different types of errors on trust in human-robot interaction: Are laboratory-based HRI experiments trustworthy?. Interaction Studies, 20(3), 455-486. https://doi.org/10.1075/is.18067.flo

© John Benjamins Publishing Company Trust is a key dimension of human-robot interaction (HRI), and has often been studied in the HRI community. A common challenge arises from the difficulty of assessing trust levels in ecologically invalid environmen... Read More about On the impact of different types of errors on trust in human-robot interaction: Are laboratory-based HRI experiments trustworthy?.

Simulation-based physics reasoning for consistent scene estimation in an HRI context (2019)
Conference Proceeding
Sallami, Y., Lemaignan, S., Clodic, A., & Alami, R. (2019). Simulation-based physics reasoning for consistent scene estimation in an HRI context. In Proceedings of the 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. , (7834-7841). https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968106

© 2019 IEEE. Reasoning about spatial and geometric relations between objects in a tabletop human-robot interaction is a challenge due to the perception not being always consistent: objects placed on a table seem to be slightly in the air; they overla... Read More about Simulation-based physics reasoning for consistent scene estimation in an HRI context.

Teaching robots social autonomy from in situ human guidance (2019)
Journal Article
Senft, E., Lemaignan, S., Baxter, P. E., Bartlett, M., & Belpaeme, T. (2019). Teaching robots social autonomy from in situ human guidance. Science Robotics, 4(35), Article eaat1186. https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aat1186

Striking the right balance between robot autonomy and human control is a core challenge in social robotics, in both technical and ethical terms. On the one hand, extended robot autonomy offers the potential for increased human productivity and for th... Read More about Teaching robots social autonomy from in situ human guidance.

Generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs. non-ambiguous (2019)
Journal Article
Wallbridge, C. D., Lemaignan, S., Senft, E., & Belpaeme, T. (2019). Generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs. non-ambiguous. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6, Article 67. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2019.00067

Generating spatial referring expressions is key to allowing robots to communicate with people in an environment. The focus of most algorithms for generation is to create a non-ambiguous description, and how best to deal with the combination explosion... Read More about Generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs. non-ambiguous.

What can you see? Identifying cues on internal states from the movements of natural social interactions (2019)
Journal Article
Bartlett, M. E., Edmunds, C. E. R., Belpaeme, T., Thill, S., & Lemaignan, S. (2019). What can you see? Identifying cues on internal states from the movements of natural social interactions. Frontiers in Robotics and AI, 6, Article 49. https://doi.org/10.3389/frobt.2019.00049

© 2019 Bartlett, Edmunds, Belpaeme, Thill and Lemaignan. In recent years, the field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has seen an increasing demand for technologies that can recognize and adapt to human behaviors and internal states (e.g., emotions an... Read More about What can you see? Identifying cues on internal states from the movements of natural social interactions.

Effective persuasion strategies for socially assistive robots (2019)
Conference Proceeding
Winkle, K., Lemaignan, S., Caleb-Solly, P., Turton, A., Leonards, U., & Bremner, P. (2019). Effective persuasion strategies for socially assistive robots. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference (277-285). https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673313

In this paper we present the results of an experimental study investigating the application of human persuasive strategies to a social robot. We demonstrate that robot displays of goodwill and similarity to the participant significantly increased rob... Read More about Effective persuasion strategies for socially assistive robots.

Towards generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs non-ambiguous (2019)
Conference Proceeding
Wallbridge, C. D., Lemaignan, S., Senft, E., & Belpaeme, T. (2019). Towards generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs non-ambiguous. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference, (616-617). https://doi.org/10.1109/HRI.2019.8673285

© 2019 IEEE. We present in this paper our work towards a new dynamic method of generating spatial referring expressions. While people are generally ambiguous in their description of locations, previous methods of artificial generation mostly consider... Read More about Towards generating spatial referring expressions in a social robot: Dynamic vs non-ambiguous.

UNDERWORLDS: Cascading situation assessment for robots (2018)
Journal Article
Wallhridge, C., Lemaignan, S., Sallami, Y., Wallbridge, C., Clodic, A., Belpaeme, T., & Alami, R. (2018). UNDERWORLDS: Cascading situation assessment for robots. Proceedings of the ... IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 7750-7757. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2018.8594094

© 2018 IEEE. We introduce UNDERWORLDS, a novel lightweight framework for cascading spatio-temporal situation assessment in robotics. UNDERWORLDS allows programmers to represent the robot's environment as real-time distributed data structures, contain... Read More about UNDERWORLDS: Cascading situation assessment for robots.

The PInSoRo dataset: Supporting the data-driven study of child-child and child-robot social dynamics (2018)
Journal Article
Lemaignan, S., Edmunds, C. E. R., Senft, E., & Belpaeme, T. (2018). The PInSoRo dataset: Supporting the data-driven study of child-child and child-robot social dynamics. PLoS ONE, 13(10), 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205999

© 2018 Lemaignan et al. The study of the fine-grained social dynamics between children is a methodological challenge, yet a good understanding of how social interaction between children unfolds is important not only to Developmental and Social Psycho... Read More about The PInSoRo dataset: Supporting the data-driven study of child-child and child-robot social dynamics.

Social Psychology and Human-Robot Interaction: An Uneasy Marriage (2018)
Conference Proceeding
Irfan, B., Kennedy, J., Lemaignan, S., Papadopoulos, F., Senft, E., & Belpaeme, T. (2018). Social Psychology and Human-Robot Interaction: An Uneasy Marriage. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference, (13-20). https://doi.org/10.1145/3173386.3173389

© 2018 ACM. The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) lies at the intersection of several disciplines, and is rightfully perceived as a prime interface between engineering and the social sciences. In particular, our field entertains close ties with... Read More about Social Psychology and Human-Robot Interaction: An Uneasy Marriage.

Qualitative Review of Object Recognition Techniques for Tabletop Manipulation (2017)
Conference Proceeding
Wallbridge, C. D., Lemaignan, S., & Belpaeme, T. (2017). Qualitative Review of Object Recognition Techniques for Tabletop Manipulation. In ACM Human-Agent Interaction Conference. , (359-363). https://doi.org/10.1145/3125739.3132593

© 2017 ACM. This paper provides a qualitative review of different object recognition techniques relevant for near-proximity Human- Robot Interaction. These techniques are divided into three categories: 2D correspondence, 3D correspondence and nonvisi... Read More about Qualitative Review of Object Recognition Techniques for Tabletop Manipulation.

Leveraging human inputs in interactive machine learning for human robot interaction (2017)
Conference Proceeding
Senft, E., Lemaignan, S., Baxter, P. E., & Belpaeme, T. (2017). Leveraging human inputs in interactive machine learning for human robot interaction. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference. , (281-282). https://doi.org/10.1145/3029798.3038385

A key challenge of HRI is allowing robots to be adaptable, especially as robots are expected to penetrate society at large and to interact in unexpected environments with non-technical users. One way of providing this adaptability is to use Interacti... Read More about Leveraging human inputs in interactive machine learning for human robot interaction.

Supervised Autonomy for Online Learning in Human-Robot Interaction (2017)
Journal Article
Senft, E., Baxter, P., Kennedy, J., Lemaignan, S., & Belpaeme, T. (2017). Supervised Autonomy for Online Learning in Human-Robot Interaction. Pattern Recognition Letters, 99, 77-86. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2017.03.015

© 2017 When a robot is learning it needs to explore its environment and how its environment responds on its actions. When the environment is large and there are a large number of possible actions the robot can take, this exploration phase can take pr... Read More about Supervised Autonomy for Online Learning in Human-Robot Interaction.

Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education (2017)
Conference Proceeding
Ozgür, A., Lemaignan, S., Johal, W., Beltran, M., Briod, M., Pereyre, L., …Dillenbourg, P. (2017). Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference, (119-127). https://doi.org/10.1145/2909824.3020247

© 2017 ACM. In this article, we present Cellulo, a novel robotic platform that investigates the intersection of three ideas for robotics in education: designing the robots to be versatile and generic tools; blending robots into the classroom by desig... Read More about Cellulo: Versatile Handheld Robots for Education.

Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction: Evaluations and Recommendations (2017)
Conference Proceeding
Kennedy, J., Lemaignan, S., Montassier, C., Lavalade, P., Irfan, B., Papadopoulos, F., …Belpaeme, T. (2017). Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction: Evaluations and Recommendations. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM/IEEE Human-Robot Interaction Conference. , (82-90). https://doi.org/10.1145/2909824.3020229

© 2017 ACM. An increasing number of human-robot interaction (HRI) studies are now taking place in applied settings with children. These interactions often hinge on verbal interaction to effectively achieve their goals. Great advances have been made i... Read More about Child Speech Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction: Evaluations and Recommendations.

Artificial Cognition for Social Human-Robot Interaction: An Implementation (2016)
Journal Article
Lemaignan, S., Warnier, M., Sisbot, E. A., Clodic, A., & Alami, R. (2017). Artificial Cognition for Social Human-Robot Interaction: An Implementation. Artificial Intelligence, 247, 45-69. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.artint.2016.07.002

© 2017 The Authors Human–Robot Interaction challenges Artificial Intelligence in many regards: dynamic, partially unknown environments that were not originally designed for robots; a broad variety of situations with rich semantics to understand and i... Read More about Artificial Cognition for Social Human-Robot Interaction: An Implementation.