Physical and Social Human-robot Interaction

This talk covers two main research directions based on the iCub humanoid robot. The iCub is a humanoid robot designed to support research in embodied AI. At 104 cm tall, the iCub has the size of a five-year-old child. It can crawl on all fours, walk, and sit up to manipulate objects. Its hands have been designed to support sophisticate manipulation skills. The iCub is distributed as Open Source following the GPL license and can now count on a worldwide community of enthusiastic developers. There are more than 40 robots available in laboratories across the globe. The iCub sensory system allows seeing, hearing and feeling physical contacts. It is one of the few platforms in the world with a sensitive full-body skin. The iCub is being used at the Italian Institute of Technology as a model platform to develop the technology of future interactive service robots. In particular, I will describe our work in the field of physical and social interaction. For example, through extensive use of machine learning, we developed algorithms to interpret and use external contact information in a variety of tasks as well as contactless cues - vision, sound - to ease interaction between the user and the robot.