Search results for "Social robot"

Robots socials. Un punt de trobada entre ciència i ficció

2014

Els robots industrials i els androides de la ciència-ficció, tan diferents fins ara, comencen a confluir gràcies al ràpid desenvolupament de la robòtica social. Atesa la creixent necessitat de mà d’obra en el sector assistencial i de serveis, s’estan dissenyant robots que puguin interaccionar amb les persones, ja sigui atenent a discapacitats i gent gran, fent de recepcionistes o dependents en centres comercials, i àdhuc actuant de mestres de reforç o mainaderes. En aquest context, proliferen les iniciatives per facilitar la inspiració mútua entre tecnociència i humanitats. Qüestions ètiques com la influència de les mainaderes robòtiques sobre el psiquisme infantil, abans tractades en obres…

A social humanoid robot as a playfellow for vocabulary enhancement

2018

We introduce a system that exploits a Pepper humanoid robot acting as a playfellow in a word-play game. The robot can play a portmanteau game by directly interacting with children, and it exploits a conversation engine, a portmanteau creation engine, and a definition engine. The humanoid can play the role of either an answerer or a generator of new words.

Exploiting Cognitive Architectures to design Storytelling Activities for NarRob

2020

In this work, we exploited the potential of a cognitive architecture to model the characters of a story in an interactive storytelling system. The system is accessible through NarRob, a humanoid social robot, able to manage storytelling activities aimed at improving the emotional and social skills of children, also adding expressiveness to the narration by using proper associate gestures and emotional expressions. Our main goal was to implement the cognitive processes of the agents interpreted by the robot within an environment coinciding with a narrative context. The narrated story is largely inspired by the "FearNot!" game, where in our system, we modeled the cognitive processes elaborate…

An android architecture for bio-inspired honest signalling in Human-Humanoid Interaction

2017

Abstract This paper outlines an augmented robotic architecture to study the conditions of successful Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI). The architecture is designed as a testable model generator for interaction centred on the ability to emit, display and detect honest signals. First we overview the biological theory in which the concept of honest signals has been put forward in order to assess its explanatory power. We reconstruct the application of the concept of honest signalling in accounting for interaction in strategic contexts and in laying bare the foundation for an automated social metrics. We describe the modules of the architecture, which is intended to implement the concept of hon…

INVESTIGATING PERCEPTUAL AND BIOLOGICAL FEEDBACKS IN HUMAN ROBOT INTERACTION

The Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is a new discipline that has attracted more attention in the last years due to the increasing presence of robots in people’s everyday life. It is a field of study dedicated to understanding, designing, and evaluating robotic systems for use by or with humans. Interaction, by definition, requires communication between robots and humans. A social robot is an autonomous or semi-autonomous robot capable of interacting and communicating with humans or other autonomous physical agents following social behaviours and rules related to its specific role. In order to interact effectively with the human being, a robot must be able to decode the complex system of human…

Attention-based environment perception 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 classical bottom-up gaze shifts allows the robot to autonomously select landmarks, defined as salient points in the camera images. Landmarks are memorized in a behavioral fashion, coupling sensing and acting to achieve a representation 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 same time…

Do humans dream of prophetic robots?

2020

Social robotics is a technology that, as its definition varies, encompasses conceptually diverse fields materializing in innovations from simple chatbots to sophisticated androids talking about the peaceful coexistence of humans and robots. The advances in social robotics have led to promising applications in education, work, entertainment, and even religion. Yet a measure of fear and confusion about the capabilities of contemporary and future robots exists, with one of the reasons being the presentation of some contemporary robots as being more advanced than they really are.

An Architecture for Telenoid Robot as Empathic Conversational Android Companion for Elderly People

2015

In Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI), empathy is the crucial key in order to overcome the current limitations of social robots. In facts, a principal defining characteristic of human social behaviour is empathy. The present paper presents a robotic architecture for an android robot as a basis for natural empathic human-android interaction. We start from the hypothesis that the robots, in order to become personal companions need to know how to empathic interact with human beings. To validate our research, we have used the proposed system with the minimalistic humanoid robot Telenoid. We have conducted human-robot interactions test with elderly people with no prior interaction experience with …

SEAI: Social Emotional Artificial Intelligence Based on Damasio’s Theory of Mind

2018

A socially intelligent robot must be capable to extract meaningful information in real-time from the social environment and react accordingly with coherent human-like behaviour. Moreover, it should be able to internalise this information, to reason on it at a higher abstract level, build its own opinions independently and then automatically bias the decision-making according to its unique experience. In the last decades, neuroscience research highlighted the link between the evolution of such complex behaviour and the evolution of a certain level of consciousness, which cannot leave out of a body that feels emotions as discriminants and prompters. In order to develop cognitive systems for s…

A cognitive architecture for robot self-consciousness

2008

Objective: One of the major topics towards robot consciousness is to give a robot the capabilities of self-consciousness. We propose that robot self-consciousness is based on higher order perception of the robot, in the sense that first-order robot perception is the immediate perception of the outer world, while higher order perception is the perception of the inner world of the robot. Methods and material: We refer to a robot cognitive architecture that has been developed during almost 10 years at the RoboticsLab of the University of Palermo. The architecture is organized in three computational areas. The subconceptual area is concerned with the low level processing of perceptual data comi…