LEARNING OUTCOMES

The objective of the course is to make students aware about the most relevant issues in the fields of social robotics, including: verbal and nonverbal human-robot interaction; cultural factors in the design of social robots; anthropomorphic and zoomorphic robots and robot behaviours; sensors for human-robot interaction; methodology and constraints in making experiments with robots and human participants; application scenarios. The student will face these problems both from a theoretical perspective and through practical assignments, by exploring in depth one of the topics above on real robots for social interaction.

AIMS AND LEARNING OUTCOMES

At the end of the class, the student will be able to:

• understand the most up to date paradigms in the development of human-robot interaction systems;
• apply the acquired knowledge to design new solutions for verbal and non-verbal interaction with social robots;
• evaluate such interaction processes in real-world conditions.

Practice classes will be carried out using a humanoid Pepper robot from SoftBanks Robotics and other HW and SW tools.

PREREQUISITES

Students must know how to program in C/C++ or Python.

TEACHING METHODS

All classes will involve thematic frontal lectures and a series of practice classes related to the discussed topics.

SYLLABUS/CONTENT

SoRo is organised as a series of thematic lectures:

• Introduction to the course
• How to design experiments involving humans and social robots.
• Affective Computations and emotions in robots
• Speech-based human-robot interaction.
• Human-Aware Navigation
• Culturally-competent social robots.
• Human-robot cooperation and Theory of Mind.

RECOMMENDED READING/BIBLIOGRAPHY

Relevant material (tech reports, slides, papers) will be distributed by the teachers during the lectures.