Objective
"Why robotic research, despite its advances, has not yet lead to the widespread use of robots in operative contexts treatable through human-robot cooperation? The SICSAR project proposes that the main reason resides not in intrinsic technical difficulties, but in the limits of the diffused expectation that, to collaborate with humans, robots need to be almost ""perfect"" - faultless - in their actions. Humans are certainly not perfect agents, and, to achieve common goals during interactions, mutually correct their behaviors to increase their possibilities of success. Transferring this self-other corrective dynamics to human-robot cooperation could be the key to effectively renew the approach to implement this kind of collaboration: renouncing to build ""perfect"" robots, and focusing on creating ""social"" robots, that is, robots able to correct their behaviors on the basis of their capability to understand humans' signals.
The proposed project aims at taking a fundamental step in this direction: developing robots able to coordinate their behaviors with those of their human partners. Today this represents a frontier issue also and specifically for HRI and social robotics, which see human-robot ""behavioral coordination"" as a sine qua non condition to integrate robots in our social context(s).
The project tackles this issue through a highly interdisciplinary approach, integrating HRI with experimental psychology, robotics and robot design research. It intends to develop hardware and software solutions providing iCub - one of the most sophisticated European robots – with a new ability: competently correlating and synchronizing its interactive movements with those of its human partners during dyadic interactions.
As argued in the proposal, the project is expected to have an impact not only on European robotics' scientific, technological, industrial and commercial competitiveness, but also on some aspects of the current socio-economic setting of the industrialized world."
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-PEOPLE-2013-IEF
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
MC-IEF - Intra-European Fellowships (IEF)Coordinator
16163 Genova
Italy