Towards socially intelligent robots
Research topic Human-Robot Interaction
Industry application Assistive Robotics, Service robots
Robotic applications have entered various aspects of our lives, such as health care and educational services. In such Human-robot Interaction (HRI), trust and mutual adaption are established and maintained through a positive social relationship between a user and a robot.
This social relationship relies on the perceived competence of a robot on the social-emotional dimension. However, because of technical limitations and user heterogeneity, current HRI is far from error-free, especially when a system leaves controlled lab environments and is applied to in-the-wild conditions.
Errors in HRI may either degrade a user’s perception of a robot’s capability in achieving a task (performance errors) or degrade a user’s perception of a robot’s socio-affective competence (social errors). The impact of these errors and effective strategies to handle such an impact remains an open question.
By addressing errors on the social-emotional dimension of HRI and identifying their impact, this project aims at developing more personalized, adaptive, and socially acceptable HRI.