social robots, Mobile Robotics Research Group, Edinburgh University

Chris Adams

social robots

Contact: Yuval Marom
Last updated: Mon Dec 10 12:32:06 2001

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.

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.
Social Interactions.

Gait Recognition. This project studies how an agent can learn to recognize another agent though its way of walking.
Face Recognition. This project tackles the problem of how to recognize faces among other objects.
Learning to Communicate. Interactions often means communication. We study how communication abilities can be learned as part of general learning abilities.
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.

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