Search results for "Human-Robot interaction"
showing 10 items of 37 documents
A Multi-touch Interface for Multi-robot Path Planning and Control
2014
In the last few years, research in human-robot interaction has moved beyond the issues concerning the design of the interaction between a person and a single robot. Today many researchers have shifted their focus toward the problem of how humans can control a multi-robot team. The rising of multi-touch devices provides a new range of opportunities in this sense. Our research seeks to discover new insights and guidelines for the design of multi-touch interfaces for the control of biologically inspired multi-robot teams. We have developed an iPad touch interface that lets users exert partial control over a set of autonomous robots. The interface also serves as an experimental platform to stud…
“It Is Not the Robot Who Learns, It Is Me.” Treating Severe Dysgraphia Using Child–Robot Interaction
2021
Writing disorders are frequent and impairing. However, social robots may help to improve children's motivation and to propose enjoyable and tailored activities. Here, we have used the Co-writer scenario in which a child is asked to teach a robot how to write via demonstration on a tablet, combined with a series of games we developed to train specifically pressure, tilt, speed, and letter liaison controls. This setup was proposed to a 10-year-old boy with a complex neurodevelopmental disorder combining phonological disorder, attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, dyslexia, and developmental coordination disorder with severe dysgraphia. Writing impairments were severe and limited his parti…
Social robots and therapeutic adherence: a new challenge in pediatric asthma?
2020
Social Robots are used in different contexts and, in healthcare, they are better known as Socially Assistive Robots. In the context of asthma, the use of Socially Assistive Robots has the potential to increase motivation and engagement to treatment. Other positive roles proposed for Socially Assistive Robots are to provide education, training regarding treatments, and feedback to patients. This review evaluates emerging interventions for improving treatment adherence in pediatric asthma, focusing on the possible future role of social robots in the clinical practice.
Agents and robots for collaborating and supporting physicians in healthcare scenarios
2020
Graphical abstract
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…
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 …