EMBODYING SOCIO-COMMUNICATIVE BEHAVIORS IN HUMANOID ROBOTS – SOMBRERO

SOMBRERO is a project of social robotics endowing humanoid robots with socio-communicative skills. The project focuses on multimodal behavior of the upper body (speech, gaze, facial expressions, head movements, gestures of the arms and hands, body posture) to manage face-to-face and situated interaction with a human partner. The originality of SOMBRERO is to learn behaviors via immersive tele-operation (or beaming). This technique allows a human driver to perceive, understand, learn and act remotely on the physical world through a robotic incarnation. This innovative strategy addresses four challenges:
1 Telepresence. Immersive teleoperation of robot companions for home caring allows health professionals or social workers to sporadically interact with their patients/clients without disrupting their daily activities. This alliance between companion robotics and therapeutic robotics has awakened the interest of insurance companies.
2 Learning behaviors. Beaming enables the interaction between the human pilot and his/her human partner. It forces the pilot to find behavioral strategies adapted to the affordances of its robotic incarnation. Machine learning techniques will retrieve multimodal data from the behavioral memory of the remotely tele-operated robot and extract the laws governing perception/decision/action loops appropriate to the situation, the task and the human partner.
3 Active perception. Context-sensitive and situated behaviors are based on the exploration and understanding of the audiovisual scene by the robot. This exploration will take into account the robot’s capacity to act and predict the actions of its human partner. SOMBRERO and develop two very hot research themes: active perception and analysis of social signals.
4 Behavioral profiles. The beaming approach allows a thoughtful assessment of the acceptability of social robots by simulating the multimodal behavior of robots with advanced social and communication skills. SOMBRERO will also identify usage patterns of a technology at the boundary between technology and humanity.
SOMBRERO will develop a beaming platform for two state of the art humanoid robots: Roméo from Aldebaran and the iCub2 at GIPSA-Lab. The consortium associates four research laboratories in Science and Information Technology (LIG, GIPSA-Lab and Lab-STICC) and Humanities and Social Sciences (LIP) with Aldebaran Robotics, a world leader in humanoid robotics.