A BCI Teleoperated Museum Robotic Guide

Brain Computer Interface is a system that offers also a support to the patients with neuromuscular diseases as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis. In this paper are presented some works with the aim to integrate brain computer interfaces and mobile robots. The two aim of this project are: (i) to test an improved BCI experience through the help of a physical robot, so that brain signals are stronger stimulate. (ii) to use a remote robot controlled by a highly paralyzed patient via a BCI through a friendly Graphic User. Some preliminary experiments are presented in this paper about one of the possible application: a robotic museum guide (PeopleBot and Pioneer3 robot), that can transmit remote visu…

A Topic Recognition System for Real World Human-Robot Conversations

One of the main features of social robots is the ability to communicate and interact with people as partners in a natural way. However, achieving a good verbal interaction is a hard task due to the errors on speech recognition systems, and due to the understanting the natural language itself. This paper tries to overcome such kind of problems by presenting a system that enables social robots to get involved in conversation by recognizing its topic. Through the use of classical text mining approach, the presented system allows social robots to understand topics of conversation between human partners, enabling the customization of behaviours in their accordance. The system has been evaluated …

Emo-dramatic Robotic Stewards

In this paper will be presented an heterogeneous colony of robots capable to cooperate with people as effective partners to provide different kind of support among various working environments, such as museums, offices or trade fairs. Many systems have been integrated in order to develop robots capable to assists humans during the visit of the site, to guide them and to give information about the environment. According to the drama’s theory, each robot has a different character, something like a personality, so, each of them will interact with people in a different way. Robots show also emotional, non trivial, behaviours using an LSA conceptual space capable to synthesize the different emot…

Towards Partners Profiling in Human Robot Interaction Contexts

Individuality is one of the most important qualities of humans. Social robots should be able to model the individuality of the human partners and to modify their behaviours accordingly.This paper proposes a profiling system for social robots to be able to learn the individuality of human partners in social contexts. Profiles are expressed in terms of of identities and preferences bound together. In particular, people’s identity is captured by the use of facial features, while preferences are extracted from the discussion between the partners. Both are bound using an Hebb network. Experiments show the feasibility and the performances of the approach presented.

An Emphatic Humanoid Robot with Emotional Latent Semantic Behavior

In this paper we propose an Entertainment Humanoid Robot model based on Latent Semantic Analysis, that tries to exhibit an emotional behavior in the interaction with human. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), based on vector space allows the coding of the words semantics by specific statistical computations applied to a large corpus of text. We illustrate how the creation and the use of this emotional conceptual space can provide a framework upon which to build “Latent Semantic Behavior” because it simulates the emotionalassociative capabilities of human beings. This approach integrates traditional knowledge representation with intuitive capabilities provided by geometric and sub-symbolic infor…

A Multimodal People Recognition System for an Intelligent Environment

In this paper, a multimodal system for recognizing people in intelligent environments is presented. Users are identified and tracked by detecting and recognizing voices and faces through cameras and microphones spread around the environment. This multimodal approach has been chosen to develop a flexible and cheap though reliable system, implemented through consumer electronics. Voice features are extracted through a short time spectrum analysis, while face features are extracted using the eigenfaces technique. The recognition task is achieved through the use of some Support Vector Machines, one per modality, that learn and classify the features of each person, while bindings between modalit…

Audio-video people recognition system for an intelligent environment

In this paper an audio-video system for intelligent environments with the capability to recognize people is presented. Users are tracked inside the environment and their positions and activities can be logged. Users identities are assessed through a multimodal approach by detecting and recognizing voices and faces through the different cameras and microphones installed in the environment. This approach has been chosen in order to create a flexible and cheap but reliable system, implemented using consumer electronics. Voice features are extracted by a short time cepstrum analysis, and face features are extracted using the eigenfaces technique. The recognition task is solved using the same Su…

Semiautomatic Behavioral Change-Point Detection: A Case Study Analyzing Children Interactions With a Social Agent

The study of human behaviors in cognitive sciences provides clues to understand and describe people’s personal and interpersonal functioning. In particular, the temporal analysis of behavioral dynamics can be a powerful tool to reveal events, correlations and causalities but also to discover abnormal behaviors. However, the annotation of these dynamics can be expensive in terms of temporal and human resources. To tackle this challenge, this paper proposes a methodology to semi-automatically annotate behavioral data. Behavioral dynamics can be expressed as sequences of simple dynamical processes: transitions between such processes are generally known as change-points. This paper describes th…

A New Architecture Based on a Simulation Environment for Four Legged and Humanoid Robots

An Innovative Mobile Phone Based System For Humanoid Robot Expressing Emotions And Personality

In this paper we illustrate a new version of the cognitive architecture of an emotional humanoid robot based on the proposed paradigm of Latent Semantic Behaviour (LSB). This paradigm is a step towards the simulation of an emotional behavior of a robot interacting with humans. The New Architecture uses a different procedure of induction of the emotional conceptual space and an Android mobile phone as user-friendly for the emotional interaction with robot. The robot generates its overall behavior also taking into account its "personality" encoded in the emotional conceptual space. To validate the system, we implemented the distribute system on a Aldebaran NAO humanoid robot and on a Android …