Expertise

Robot Ethics

HRI 2023

Fresh Start: Encouraging Politeness in Wakeword-Driven Human-Robot Interaction

Participants interacted with a Softbank Pepper using to one of three condition-specified Wakewords: “Excuse me Pepper”, “Pepper Please”, and “Hey Pepper”.

Deployed social robots are increasingly relying on wakeword-based interaction, where interactions are human-initiated by a wakeword like “Hey Jibo”. While wakewords help to increase speech recognition accuracy and ensure privacy, there is concern that wakeword-driven interaction could encourage impolite behavior because wakeword-driven speech is typically phrased as commands. To address these concerns, companies have… Continue reading Fresh Start: Encouraging Politeness in Wakeword-Driven Human-Robot Interaction

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HRI 2022

Teacher, Teammate, Subordinate, Friend: Generating Norm Violation Responses Grounded in Role-based Relational Norms

Robot ethics

Language-capable robots require moral competence, including representations and algorithms for moral reasoning and moral communication. We argue for an ethical pluralist approach to moral competence that leverages and combines disparate ethical frameworks, and specifically argue for an approach to moral competence that is grounded not only in Deontological norms (as is typical in the… Continue reading Teacher, Teammate, Subordinate, Friend: Generating Norm Violation Responses Grounded in Role-based Relational Norms

Published