robotics designers

Abstract: Humanoid face robots can now move their lips in sync with speech and show detailed facial expressions. Give such a robot the face of a real person and drive it with generated speech, and you get a face forgery that happens in front of the camera: the camera records a real object, and no pixel is edited. We call this a RoboFake. In this paper we ask what current deepfake detectors do when they see a robot face. We test six public detectors trained on FaceForensics++ on video of a physical lip-syncing face robot, on a synthesized video of the same robot, and on rendered robot faces. All thresholds are fixed on FaceForensics++, and every result is compared with real human faces that went through the same processing as the robot videos. At a threshold that flags 5% of real faces, three detectors flag almost every physical robot frame, while two flag fewer than 7%. A matched human control and masking show that the response comes from the face, not from the processing or the background. However, it does not track synthesis: with only the face visible, three of the six detectors give the physical robot a higher fake score than its synthesized video. The response is also fragile, and light JPEG compression is enough to push most robot frames below the threshold for some detectors. Our results suggest that current detectors flag today's robots because their faces do not look human, not because they recognize a forgery. We release our evaluation protocol and code, and state three testable hypotheses about realistic, interactive RoboFakes.

Abstract: Robot assistance is particularly crucial in unfamiliar tasks, where users must understand task requirements while coordinating with the robot. Previous research offers mixed evidence on the role of robot proxemics in user engagement: some studies suggest closer proximity enhances interaction, while others report it can feel intrusive. In this work, we argue that perceptions of intrusiveness depend not only on proxemics but also on the frequency of robot interventions, and are strongly influenced by individual traits such as personality and demographics. We conducted an experiment with 32 participants who interacted with two assistive robots that provided similar task support but differed in their intervention strategies. Results indicate that overall engagement remains stable across conditions, yet affective responses and perceived intrusiveness vary significantly with personality traits. Moreover, personality shapes interaction dynamics differently depending on the robot's behavior. These findings emphasize that effective human-robot interaction should account for individual differences, tailoring robot behavior to maintain engagement while respecting each user's unique affective and behavioral profile.