Social Robotics

speaker: Dr. Gerhard Sagerer, Rector, Bielefeld University, Germany event: Xu Guangqi Lecture Series date: 3:00 pm May 6, 2011 place: Grand Lecture Hall, SIBS Main Building

Measuring cognitive performance

Robots cannot be programmed for all possible situations, they need to be able to learn!

Statistical learning procedures need many training examples.

Learning from interaction: master and apprentice, learning as a social activity (a kind of communication)

Robocup tournament in Singapore: to teach a robot to pickup an item from a shop and bring it to the checkout

Interacting with robots

• subjects must not be computer scientists or familiar with robots
• feedback is very important
• emotions is crucial in human interactions
• feedback by emotion mimicry

Acoustic packaging: speech + motion segmentation

Flobi robot with facial expression

Social robotics

• getting humans to “believe” that the robots are more than they seem
• learning from interaction with humans