Search results for "Social robot"

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human–robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estimate…

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.

Brain Controlled Architecture for Human-Human Interaction Mediated by a Humanoid Robot

2017

This paper presents an Assistive social robots architecture designed for social interaction with humans, mediated by a humanoid robot. The architecture has been designed for being used by people with severe paralysis and the architecture has been tested by a user affected by amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in a locked-in state. The system allows the patient to communicate with the stakeholders using a Brain Controlled Interface, based on Evoked Response Potentials (ERP), to express needing, feelings or writing phases. Stakeholders visualize messages sent by the patient on a GUI and use a tele operated humanoid robot as an avatar of them to extend their physical presence to interact with…

A vision agent for mobile robot navigation in time-variable environments

2002

We present an architecture for mobile robot navigation based on Bayesian networks. The architecture allows a robot to plan the correct path inside an environment with dynamic obstacles. Interactions between the robot and the environment are based on a powerful vision agent. The results of simulations, showing the effectiveness of the approach, are described.

Embodied responses to musical experience detected by human bio-feedback brain features in a geminoid augmented architecture

2018

Abstract This paper presents the conceptual framework for a study of musical experience and the associated architecture centred on Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI). On the grounds of the theoretical and experimental literature on the biological foundation of music, the grammar of music perception and the perception and feeling of emotions in music hearing, we argue that music cognition is specific and that it is realized by a cognitive capacity for music that consists of conceptual and affective constituents. We discuss the relationship between such constituents that enables understanding, that is extracting meaning from music at the different levels of the organization of sounds that are f…

Communities of Communication: Making Sense of the “Social” in Social Media

2012

As social media usage permeates people's lives, an increasing portion of their daily behavior leaves digital traces to be used by researchers. Social scientists can hope to gain new insight into the previously hidden but digitally recorded aspects of our digital social lives. Beyond aggregate and individual-level studies of user behavior, the digital traces also enable scientific examination of the structure of social interaction through networks. At the same time, the large scale and networked nature of social media data pose a new set of challenges to be overcome through the development of sound methodologies. We take stock of current methodological promises and challenges in social media…

Social Robots and Human Touch in Care : The Perceived Usefulness of Robot Assistance Among Healthcare Professionals

2019

Touching in care work is inevitable, particularly in cases where clients depend on nurses for many activities of daily living, such as bathing, dressing, lifting and assisting. When new technologies are involved in nurse–client relationships, the significance of human touch needs special attention. Stressing the importance of practitioners’ opinions on the usage of robots in care environments, we analyze care workers’ attitudes toward robot assistance in the care of older people and reflect on their ideas of the embodied relationship that caregivers and care receivers have with technology. To examine nurses’ attitudes toward care robots, we use survey data on professional care workers (n = …

Attention-Based Landmark Selection in Autonomous Robotics

2007

This paper describes a robotic architecture that uses visual attention mechanisms for autonomous navigation in unknown indoor environments. A foveation mechanism based on a bottom-up attention system allows the robot to autonomously select landmarks, defined as salient points in the camera images. Landmarks are memorized in a behavioral fashion by coupling sensing and acting to achieve a representation that is view and scale independent. Selected landmarks are stored in a topological map. During the navigation a top-down mechanism controls the attention system to achieve robot localization. Experiments and results show that our system is robust to noise and odometric errors, being at the sa…

The design of interfaces for multi-robot path planning and control

2014

The field of human-robot interaction has evolved beyond issues concerning the design and development of one person controlling one robot to exploring HRI for groups of robots and teams. Our design research explores biologically-inspired motion that is initiated by a human operator, applied to a single or a small group of robots, and used to affect the motion and path planning of another subset of robots. This exploratory design study first created a taxonomy to categorize individual robot motions, looking at how they could be categorized and used as building blocks. We then combined individual motions with time and velocity as design variables to guide our interaction design. This work led …

A Topic Recognition System for Real World Human-Robot Conversations

2013

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 …