Publications

This study explores the impact of appearance and speech on human perceptions of faces in human-robot interactions. Three videos were generated depicting the real face of an artist and two virtual versions of the same artist, with increasing resolution and fidelity. Each video was presented with and without speech, with matching levels of fidelity to…

Counting is a common preventative measure taken to ensure surgical instruments are not retained during surgery, which could cause serious detrimental effects including chronic pain and sepsis. A hybrid human-AI system could support or partially automate this manual counting of instruments. An important element to evaluate the viability of using deep learning computer vision-based counting…

This paper describes the implementation and evaluation of a public interactive robotic art installation in a rehabilitation hospital, aiming to provide an enjoyable artistic experience and to understand how human-centred robotics might promote wellbeing and quality of life for hospital communities.

This paper explores the efficacy of physical embodiment in social robots through a cross human-robot and human-computer interaction study conducted in a public setting, highlighting the importance of in-the-wild user studies for the commercial viability of social robots.

This paper presents the design of a human-inspired gripper for textile manipulation, drawing on insights from human hand biomechanics and textile handling techniques to create a gripper that can effectively manipulate textiles in waste sorting applications.

Researching human-robot interaction “in the wild” can sometimes require insight from different fields. Experiments that involve collaborative tasks are valuable opportunities for studying HRI and developing new tools. The following describes a framework for an “in the wild” experiment situated in a public museum that involved a Wizard of OZ (WOZ) controlled robot. The UR10…

This paper presents a case study on the early-stage implementation of service robots in an aged care home in Australia, identifying key facilitators and barriers to successful deployment and providing a blueprint for long-term effectiveness and commercial viability of robots in aged care. D. C. Herath, L. Martin, S. Doolan and J. B. Grant, “Robots…

This paper explores the integration of multiple AI systems to unleash artificial cognition, presenting a novel framework for combining different AI models to achieve more complex and human-like cognitive abilities. Adnan, Muntasir; Gamage, Buddhi; Xu, Zhiwei; Herath, Damith; and Kuhn, Carlos, “Unleashing Artificial Cognition: Integrating Multiple AI Systems” (2024). ACIS 2024 Proceedings. 31. https://aisel.aisnet.org/acis2024/31

This paper presents a new framework for understanding and designing social presence in human-robot interaction, based on empirical studies and theoretical analysis. N. H. Wijesinghe, Y. Peng, S. Konrad, M. Jayasuriya, J. B. Grant, and D. Herath, “Reframing Social Presence for Human Robot Interaction,” in Proceedings of the 2025 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction,…

This paper investigates the dramaturgical potential of human-robot ensembles through a practice-as-research approach, utilizing devised physical theatre to explore new dimensions of human-robot interaction. M. Jayasuriya, P. Wijesundara, and D. Herath, “Exploring Dramaturgical Potential in Human-Robot Ensembles: A Practice-as-Research Investigation through Devised Physical Theatre,” 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Atlanta, USA,…