Joint AASS & CREA Seminar - Humans and Robots Together: Engineering sociality and collaboration

The research centre AASS arranges a seminar with Ana Paiva, Instituto Superior Técnico, University of Lisbon.

Abstract

Robots are entering not only our workplace but also our homes. Research in human-robot interaction (HRI) is growing exponentially, with many systems and studies evaluating the acceptance of robots in different contexts and among different populations.  Robots are now perceived as machines that not only will support humans in specific tasks, but will also complement them in activities that humans cannot perform.  As such, robots will have to act autonomously, performing complex tasks in an intelligent way, as well as be able to interact with humans, adapt to them and perform activities together as team members.  One of the challenges that AI (Artificial Intelligence) and robotics face nowadays is how to create social AI and social robotics that interact with humans in an engaging, natural, and most importantly "humane" way, recognizing and respecting human values and social norms.  To do that, researchers must develop new models, new algorithms and new techniques that will endow our machines with social competencies.  This requires an understanding of people and their goals and emotions as well as the surrounding context, including the social context.  In this talk I will argue that, for building successful, human-robot interactions that respect moral and social values and are able to collaborate with humans in a natural way, robots must be endowed with social and emotional processing, and be able to respond to the humans and adapt to their environmental and social context.  I will therefore overview this new challenging research area and present some application cases borrowed from educational and entertainment robotics, where empathy, group awareness and adaptation have been explored to deepen the relation between humans and social robots.