Search results for "HUMAN-ROBOT"
showing 10 items of 47 documents
What robots want? Hearing the inner voice of a robot.
2021
Summary The inner speech is thoroughly studied in humans, and it represents an interdisciplinary research issue involving psychology, neuroscience, and pedagogy. A few papers only, mostly theoretical, analyze the role of inner speech in robots. The present study investigates the potential of the robot's inner speech while cooperating with human partners. A cognitive architecture is designed and integrated with standard robot routines into a complex framework. Two threads of interaction are discussed by setting the robot operations with and without inner speech. Thanks to the robotic self-dialog, the partner can easily trace the robot's processes. Moreover, the robot can better solve conflic…
HR1 Robot: An Assistant for Healthcare Applications
2022
According to the World Health Organization1,2 the percentage of healthcare dependent population, such as elderly and people with disabilities, among others, will increase over the next years. This trend will put a strain on the health and social systems of most countries. The adoption of robots could assist these health systems in responding to this increased demand, particularly in high intensity and repetitive tasks. In a previous work, we compared a Socially Assistive Robot (SAR) with a Virtual Agent (VA) during the execution of a rehabilitation task. The SAR consisted of a humanoid R1 robot, while the Virtual Agent represented its simulated counter-part. In both cases, the agents evalua…
A probabilistic approach to learning a visually grounded language model through human-robot interaction
2010
A Language is among the most fascinating and complex cognitive activities that develops rapidly since the early months of infants' life. The aim of the present work is to provide a humanoid robot with cognitive, perceptual and motor skills fundamental for the acquisition of a rudimentary form of language. We present a novel probabilistic model, inspired by the findings in cognitive sciences, able to associate spoken words with their perceptually grounded meanings. The main focus is set on acquiring the meaning of various perceptual categories (e. g. red, blue, circle, above, etc.), rather than specific world entities (e. g. an apple, a toy, etc.). Our probabilistic model is based on a varia…
Sensorimotor Communication for Humans and Robots: Improving Interactive Skills by Sending Coordination Signals
2018
During joint actions, humans continuously exchange coordination signals and use nonverbal, sensorimotor forms of communication. Here we discuss a specific example of sensorimotor communication-"signaling"-which consists in the intentional modification of one's own action plan (e.g., a plan for reaching a glass of wine) to make it more predictable or discriminable from alternative action plans that are contextually plausible (e.g., a plan for reaching another glass on the same table). We first review the existing evidence on signaling in human-human interactions, discussing under which conditions humans use signaling. Successively, we distill these insights into a computational theory of sig…
Recognizing actions with the associative self-organizing map
2013
When artificial agents interact and cooperate with other agents, either human or artificial, they need to recognize others’ actions and infer their hidden intentions from the sole observation of their surface level movements. Indeed, action and intention understanding in humans is believed to facilitate a number of social interactions and is supported by a complex neural substrate (i.e. the mirror neuron system). Implementation of such mechanisms in artificial agents would pave the route to the development of a vast range of advanced cognitive abilities, such as social interaction, adaptation, and learning by imitation, just to name a few. We present a first step towards a fully-fledged int…
ROBOTIC INTERACTION AND COOPERATION. Industrial and rehabilitative applications
2014
The main goal of the thesis is the development of human-robotic interaction control strategies, which enable close collaboration between human and robot. In this framework we studied two di erent aspects, with applications respectively in industrial and rehabilitation domains. In the rst part safety issues are examined on a scenario in which a robot manipulator and a human perform the same task and in the same workspace. During the task execution the human should be able to get into contact with the robot and in this case an estimation algorithm of both interaction forces and contact point is proposed in order to guarantee safety conditions. At the same time, all the unintended contacts hav…
BAYESIAN APPROACHES TO HUMAN-ROBOT INTERACTION: FROM LANGUAGE GROUNDING TO ACTION LEARNING AND UNDERSTANDING
2012
In human-robot interaction field, the robot is no longer considered as a tool but as a partner, which supports the work of humans. Environments that feature the interaction and collaboration of humans and robots present a number of challenges involving robot learning and interactive capabilities. In order to operate in these environments, the robot must not only be able to do, but also be able to interact and especially to ”understand”. This thesis proposes a unified probabilistic framework that allows a robot to develop basic cognitive skills essential for collaboration. To this aim we embrace the idea of motor simulation - well established in cognitive science and neuroscience - in which …
A global workspace theory model for trust estimation in human-robot interaction
2019
Successful and genuine social connections between humans are based on trust, even more when the people involved have to collaborate to reach a shared goal. With the advent of new findings and technologies in the field of robotics, it appears that this same key factor that regulates relationships between humans also applies with the same importance to human-robot interactions (HRI). Previous studies have proven the usefulness of a robot able to estimate the trustworthiness of its human collaborators and in this position paper we discuss a method to extend an existing state-of-the-art trust model with considerations based on social cues such as emotions. The proposed model follows the Global …
Vision and emotional flow in a cognitive architecture for human-machine interaction
2011
The detection and recognition of a human face should meet the need for social interaction that drives a humanoid robot, and it should be consistent with its cognitive model and the perceived scene. The paper deals with the description of the potential of having a system of emotional contagion, and proposes a simple implementation of it. An emotional index allows to build a mechanism which tends to align the emotional states of the robot and the human when a specific object is detected in the scene. Pursuing the idea of social interaction based on affect recognition, a first practical application capable of managing the emotional flow is described, involving both conceptual spaces and an emo…
A MOBILE ROBOT FOR TRANSPORT APPLICATIONS IN HOSPITAL DOMAIN WITH SAFE HUMAN DETECTION ALGORITHM
2009
We have been developing a MKR (Muratec Keio Robot), an autonomous omni-directional mobile transfer robot system for hospital applications. This robot has a wagon truck to transfer luggage, important specimens and other materials. This study proposes a safe obstacle collision avoidance technique that includes a human detection algorithm for omni directional mobile robots that realizes a safe movement technology. The robot can distinguish people from others obstacles with human detection algorithm. The robot evades to people more safely by considering its relative position and velocity with respect to them. Some experiments in a hospital were carried out to verify the performance of the human…