Marcello Giardina

Reaching and grasping a glass of water by locked-In ALS patients through a BCI-controlled humanoid robot

Locked-in Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) patients are fully dependent on caregivers for any daily need. At this stage, basic communication and environmental control may not be possible even with commonly used augmentative and alternative communication devices. Brain Computer Interface (BCI) technology allows users to modulate brain activity for communication and control of machines and devices, without requiring a motor control. In the last several years, numerous articles have described how persons with ALS could effectively use BCIs for different goals, usually spelling. In the present study, locked-in ALS patients used a BCI system to directly control the humanoid robot NAO (Aldebaran Robotics, France) with the aim of reaching and grasping a glass of water. Four ALS patients and four healthy controls were recruited and trained to operate this humanoid robot through a P300-based BCI. A few minutes training was sufficient to efficiently operate the system in different environments. Three out of the four ALS patients and all controls successfully performed the task with a high level of accuracy. These results suggest that BCI-operated robots can be used by locked-in ALS patients as an artificial alter-ego, the machine being able to move, speak and act in his/her place.

Perceptual Social Dimensions of Human - Humanoid Robot Interaction

The present paper aims at a descriptive analysis of the main perceptual and social features of natural conditions of agent interaction, which can be specified by agent in human-humanoid robot interaction. A principled approach to human-robot interaction may be assumed to comply with the natural conditions of agents overt perceptual and social behaviour. To validate our research we used the minimalistic humanoid robot Telenoid. We have conducted human-robot interactions test with people with no prior interaction experience with robot. By administrating our questionnaire to subject after well defined experimental conditions, an analysis of significant variance correlation among dimensions in ordinary and goal guided contexts of interaction has been performed in order to prove that perception and believability are indicators of social interaction and increase the degree of interaction in human-humanoid interaction. The experimental results showed that Telenoid is seen from the users as an autonomous agent on its own rather than a teleoperated artificial agent and as a believable agent for its naturally acting in response to human agent actions.

An architecture for Telenoid robot as empathic conversational android companion for elderly people

In Human-Humanoid Interaction (HHI), empathy is the crucial key in order to overcome the current limitations of social robots. In facts, a principal defining characteristic of human social behaviour is empathy. The present paper presents a robotic architecture for an android robot as a basis for natural empathic human-android interaction. We start from the hypothesis that the robots, in order to become personal companions need to know how to empathic interact with human beings. To validate our research, we have used the proposed system with the minimalistic humanoid robot Telenoid. We have conducted human-robot interactions test with elderly people with no prior interaction experience with robot. During the experiment, elderly persons engaged a stimulated conversation with the humanoid robot. Our goal is to overcome the state of loneliness of elderly people using this minimalistic humanoid robot capable to exhibit a dialogue similar to what usually happens in real life between human beings. The experimental results have shown a humanoid robotic system capable to exhibit a natural and empathic interaction and conversation with a human user.

Investigating Perceptual Features for a Natural Human - Humanoid Robot Interaction Inside a Spontaneous Setting

The present paper aims to validate our research on human-humanoid interaction (HHI) using the minimalistic humanoid robot Telenoid. We have conducted human-robot interactions test with 100 young people with no prior interaction experience with this robot. The main goal is the analysis of the two social dimension (perception and believability) useful for increasing the natural behavior between users and Telenoid. We administrated our custom questionnaire to these subjects after a well defined experimental setting (ordinary and goal-guided task). After the analysis of the questionnaires, we obtained the proof that perceptual and believability conditions are necessary social dimensions for a successfully and efficiency HHI interaction in every daylife activities.

UnipaBCI a Novel General Software Framework for Brain Computer Interface

The increasing interest in Brain Computer Interface (BCI) requires new fast, reliable and scalable frameworks that can be used by researchers to develop BCI based high performance applications in efficient and fast ways. In this paper is presented “UnipaBCI”, a general software framework for BCI applications based on electroencephalography (EEG) that can fulfill these new needs. A visual evoked potentials (VEP) application has also been developed using the proposed framework in order to test the modular architecture and the overall performance. Different types of users (beginners and experts in BCI) have been involved during the “UnipaBCI” experimental test and they have exhibited good and comparable results.

Conveying Audience Emotions through Humanoid Robot Gestures to an Orchestra during a Live Musical Exhibition

In the last twenty years, robotics have been applied in many heterogeneous contexts. Among them, the use of humanoid robots during musical concerts have been proposed and investigated by many authors. In this paper, we propose a contribution in the area of robotics application in music, consisting of a system for conveying audience emotions during a live musical exhibition, by means of a humanoid robot. In particular, we provide all spectators with a mobile app, by means of which they can select a specific color while listening to a piece of music (act). Each color is mapped to an emotion, and the audience preferences are then processed in order to select the next act to be played. This decision, based on the overall emotion felt by the audience, is then communicated by the robot through body gestures to the orchestra. Our first results show that spectators enjoy such kind of interactive musical performance, and are encouraging for further investigations.

Development of intelligent service robots

The creation of intelligent robots has been a major goal of Artificial Intelligence since the early days and has provided many motivations to Artificial Intelligence researchers. Therefore, a large body of research has been done in this field and many relevantresultshaveshownthatintegrationofArtificialIntelligenceandRoboticstechniquesisaviableapproachtowardsthisgoal. ThisarticlesummarizestheeffortsandtheachievementsofseveralItalianresearchgroupsinthedevelopmentofintelligentrobotic systems characterized by a suitable integration of Artificial Intelligence and Robotic techniques. The contributions collected in this article show the long history of this research stream, the impact of the developed approaches in the scientific community, and the efforts towards actual deployment of the developed systems.

A New Humanoid Architecture for Social Interaction between Human and a Robot Expressing Human-Like Emotions Using an Android Mobile Device as Interface

In this paper we illustrate a humanoid robot able to interact socially and naturally with a human by expressing human-like body emotions. The emotional architecture of this robot is based on an emotional conceptual space generated using the paradigm of Latent Semantic Analysis. The robot generates its overall affective behavior (Latent Semantic Behavior) taking into account the visual and phrasal stimuli of human user, the environment and its personality, all encoded in his emotional conceptual space. The robot determines its emotion according by all these parameters that influence and orient the generation of his behavior not predictable from the user. The goal of this approach is to obtain an affinity matching with humans. The robot exhibit a smoothly natural transition in his emotion changes during the interaction with humans taking also into account the previous generated emotions. To validate the system, we implemented the distribute system on an Aldebaran NAO small humanoid robot and on a Android Phone HTC and we tested this social emotional interaction using the phone device as intelligent interface between human and robot in a complex scenario.