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 behavior. Moreover, it should be able to internalize this information, to reason on it...
Humans have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize surrounding entities and have always been fascinated by the creation of machines endowed with human-inspired capabilities and traits. In the last few decades, this has become a reality with enormous...
In this work, we present an unobtrusive and non-invasive perception framework based on the synergy between two main acquisition systems: the Touch-Me Pad, consisting of two electronic patches for physiological signal extraction and processing; and the...
Robots are gradually but steadily being introduced in our daily lives. A paramount application is that of education, where robots can assume the role of a tutor, a peer or simply a tool to help learners in a specific knowledge domain. Such endeavor...
This paper presents the EU EASEL project, which explores the potential impact and relevance of a robot in educational settings. We present the project objectives and the theorectical background on which the project builds, briefly introduce the EASEL...
This work introduces the concept of "personality-friendly" objects. Its goal is to investigate the relationship that can exist between specific interactive products and the users' personalities. Nowadays, it seems that every object being advertised and...
Building a social robot that is able to interact naturally with people is a challenging task that becomes even more ambitious if the robots’ interlocutors are children involved in crowded scenarios like a classroom or a museum. In such scenarios, the...
Robot’s perception is essential for performing highlevel tasks such as understanding, learning, and in general, human-robot interaction (HRI). For this reason, different perception systems have been proposed for different robotic platforms in order to...
How experienced emotional states, induced by the events that emerge in our context, influence our behaviour? Are they an obstacle or a helpful assistant for our reasoning process? Antonio Damasio gave exhaustive answers to these questions through his...
Sensing and interpreting the interlocutor’s social behaviours is a core challenge in the development of social robots. Social robots require both an innovative sensory apparatus able to perceive the “social and emotional world” in which they act and a...