Nowadays personality disorders have become a social plague. Social and behavioral difficulties very often lead to segregation and social impairment. On the basis of various psychological studies we believe that highly bealiveble humanlike robots can be used as emotional conveying systems for training people with social impairments. Our implementation is organized in two parallel branches: an in...

In social robotics it has been a crucial issue to determine the minimal set of relevant behaviour actions that humans interpret as social competencies. As a potential alternative of mimicking human abilities, it has been proposed to use a non-human animal, the dog as a natural model for developing simple, nonlinguistic emotional expressions for non-humanoid social robots. In the present study h...

Interactive robots, virtual environments and other computer based technologies are increasingly applied in rehabilitation therapy and education. The research presented in this thesis investigates the potential use of a humanoid robot as assistive technology for encouraging social interaction skills specifically in children with autism. The research focuses on ways in which the humanoid robot ca...

This paper presents the results of an experiment in humanrobot social interaction. Its purpose was to measure the impact of certain features and behaviors on people’s willingness to engage in a short interaction with a robot. The behaviors tested were the ability to convey expression with a humanoid face and the ability to indicate attention by turning towards the person that the robot is addre...

This paper proposes a methodology for learning joint probability estimates regarding the effect of sensorimotor features on the predicated quality of desired behavior. These relationships can then be used to choose actions that will most likely produce success. relational dependency networks are used to learn statistical models of procedural task knowledge. An example task expert for picking up...

The study of social learning in robotics has been motivated by both scientific interest in the learning process and practical desires to produce machines that are useful, flexible, and easy to use. In this review, we introduce the social and task-oriented aspects of robot imitation. We focus on methodologies for addressing two fundamental problems. First, how does the robot know what to imitate...

This paper explores the use of imitation in an on-going research program aimed at enabling a humanoid robot to communicate naturally with humans. Our group has constructed an upper-torso humanoid robot, called Cog, in part to investigate how to build intelligent robotic systems by following a developmental progression of skills similar to that observed in human development. Just as a child lear...

Development of humanoid robots has to address two vital aspects, namely physical appearance and gestures, that will allow the machines to closely resemble humans. Other aspects such as "social" and "emotional" will enable human-machine interaction to be as natural as possible. The field of robotics has long been investigating how effective interaction between humans and autonomous and intellige...

Anthropomorphic “humanoid” robots are suggested to be more competent in social communicative interactions than industrial robots, because humans interact more intuitively with them. It is, therefore, critical to evaluate the acceptance of an agent as possible partner for joint interaction. One possible method is to utilize the phenomenon of motor interference (MI). It claims, that observation o...