owner: yuvalm

What is a social robot?

No, it is not a robot that organizes or goes to parties (although it would be pleasant!).

Sociality implies interactional relationships. An agent able of interactive, communicative behaviour would be considered as social.

Our current research tackles some aspects of social behaviour applied to robots, as described below.


Developing new skills through interactions

One of our current project concerns Learning by Imitation. Interactive relationships between two agents conduct one agent to learn to develop new skills by the observation and then the imitation of a second agent.

Analytical observation of other agent in order to distinguish between individuals is also studied in two current projects:

- The Gait Recognition project studies how an agent can learn to recognize another agent though its way of walking.

- The Face Recognition project tackles the problem of how to recognize faces among other objects.


Learning skills in order to interact

Interactions means often communication. We study how communication abilities can be learned as part of general learning abilities. More can be found in the page Learning to Communicate


Interacting

An other interesting project of ours is the Cat Project. The idea is to build a robust robotic cat capable of surviving in a real academic environment for weeks without human intervention. Heat sensors for detecting living-human beings and ears would provide it with a way to possibly recognize and interact with humans.


People

Home pages of people in our group involved in these projects include

Previous Researchers