We report on an extensive study of the benefits and limitations of current deep learning approaches to object recognition in robot vision scenarios, introducing a novel dataset used for our investigation. To avoid the biases in currently available datasets, we consider a natural human-robot interaction setting to design a data-acquisition protocol for visual object recognition on the iCub humanoid robot. Analyzing the performance of off-the-shelf models trained off-line on large-scale image retrieval datasets, we show the necessity for knowledge transfer. We evaluate different ways in which this last step can be done, and identify the major bottlenecks affecting robotic scenarios. By studying both object categorization and identification problems, we highlight key differences between object recognition in robotics applications and in image retrieval tasks, for which the considered deep learning approaches have been originally designed. In a nutshell, our results confirm the remarkable improvements yield by deep learning in this setting, while pointing to specific open challenges that need be addressed for seamless deployment in robotics.
This study uses multisensory data (i.e., color and depth) to recognize human actions in the context of multimodal human-robot interaction. Here we employed the iCub robot to observe the predefined actions of the human partners by using four different tools on 20 objects. We show that the proposed multimodal ensemble learning leverages complementary characteristics of three color cameras and one depth sensor that improves, in most cases, recognition accuracy compared to the models trained with a single modality. The results indicate that the proposed models can be deployed on the iCub robot tha…
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；The BioRobotics Institute, Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（圣安娜高等学校生物机器人研究所）；Adaptive Systems Group, Department of Computer Science（计算机科学系自适应系统组）
This document presents novel datasets, constructed by employing the iCub robot equipped with an additional depth sensor and color camera. We used the robot to acquire color and depth information for 210 objects in different acquisition scenarios. At this end, the results were large scale datasets for robot and computer vision applications: object representation, object recognition and classification, and action recognition.
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Università di Genova（热那亚大学）
The ability to visually recognize objects is a fundamental skill for robotics systems. Indeed, a large variety of tasks involving manipulation, navigation or interaction with other agents, deeply depends on the accurate understanding of the visual scene. Yet, at the time being, robots are lacking good visual perceptual systems, which often become the main bottleneck preventing the use of autonomous agents for real-world applications. Lately in computer vision, systems that learn suitable visual representations and based on multi-layer deep convolutional networks are showing remarkable performa…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
While interacting with another person, our reactions and behavior are much affected by the emotional changes within the temporal context of the interaction. Our intrinsic affective appraisal comprising perception, self-assessment, and the affective memories with similar social experiences will drive specific, and in most cases addressed as proper, reactions within the interaction. This paper proposes the roadmap for the development of multimodal research which aims to empower a robot with the capability to provide proper social responses in a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenario.
EPHE Paris（巴黎高等研究实践学院）；LIP6（巴黎第六大学计算机科学实验室）；Sorbonne Univ.（索邦大学）；UPMC Univ Paris 06（巴黎第六大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR)（智能系统与机器人研究所）；Univ. de Lorraine（洛林大学）；INRIA（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）
To investigate the functional and social acceptance of a humanoid robot, we carried out an experimental study with 56 adult participants and the iCub robot. Trust in the robot has been considered as a main indicator of acceptance in decision-making tasks characterized by perceptual uncertainty (e.g., evaluating the weight of two objects) and socio-cognitive uncertainty (e.g., evaluating which is the most suitable item in a specific context), and measured by the participants' conformation to the iCub's answers to specific questions. In particular, we were interested in understanding whether spe…
Italian Institute of Technology（意大利技术研究院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）
This study presents novel strategies to investigate the mutual influence of trust and group dynamics in children-robot interaction. We implemented a game-like experimental activity with the humanoid robot iCub and designed a questionnaire to assess how the children perceived the interaction. We also aim to verify if the sensors, setups, and tasks are suitable for studying such aspects. The questionnaires' results demonstrate that youths perceive iCub as a friend and, typically, in a positive way. Other preliminary results suggest that, generally, children trusted iCub during the activity and, …
The purpose of the present study is to learn emotion expression representations for artificial agents using reward shaping mechanisms. The approach takes inspiration from the TAMER framework for training a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) to learn to express different emotions on the iCub robot in a human-robot interaction scenario. The robot uses a combination of a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and a Self-Organising Map (SOM) to recognise an emotion and then learns to express the same using the MLP. The objective is to teach a robot to respond adequately to the user's perception of emotions a…
Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)（意大利理工学院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）
In our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex, personalized, adaptive interactions with our peers. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and affective states and be capable of continuously adapting its behavior to them. One proposed solution to this problem would involve the robot to learn how to select the behaviors that would maximize the pleasantness of the interaction for its peers, guided by an internal motivation system that would provide autonomy to its decision-making process. We are int…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；Università degli Studi di Genova（热那亚大学）
Human perception is based on unconscious inference, where sensory input integrates with prior information. This phenomenon, known as context dependency, helps in facing the uncertainty of the external world with predictions built upon previous experience. On the other hand, human perceptual processes are inherently shaped by social interactions. However, how the mechanisms of context dependency are affected is to date unknown. If using previous experience - priors - is beneficial in individual settings, it could represent a problem in social scenarios where other agents might not have the same…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
When a human and a humanoid robot collaborate physically, ergonomics is a key factor to consider. Assuming a given humanoid robot, several control architectures exist nowadays to address ergonomic physical human-robot collaboration. This paper takes one step further by considering robot hardware parameters as optimization variables in the problem of collaborative payload lifting. The variables that parametrize robot's kinematics and dynamics ensure their physical consistency, and the human model is considered in the optimization problem. By leveraging the proposed modelling framework, the ergo…
Physical interactions are inevitable part of human-robot collaboration tasks and rather than exhibiting simple reactive behaviors to human interactions, collaborative robots need to be endowed with intuitive behaviors. This paper proposes a trajectory advancement approach that facilitates advancement along a reference trajectory by leveraging assistance from helpful interaction wrench present during human-robot collaboration. We validate our approach through experiments in simulation with iCub.
Heidelberg University（海德堡大学）；Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT)（意大利理工学院）
The humanoid robot iCub is a research platform of the Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), spread among different institutes around the world. In the most recent version of iCub, the robot is equipped with stronger legs and bigger feet, allowing it to perform balancing and walking motions that were not possible with the first generations. Despite the new legs hardware, walking has been rarely performed on the iCub robot. In this work the objective is to implement walking motions on the robot, from which we want to analyze its walking capabilities. We developed software modules bas…
Forthcoming applications concerning humanoid robots may involve physical interaction between the robot and a dynamic environment. In such scenario, classical balancing and walking controllers that neglect the environment dynamics may not be sufficient for achieving a stable robot behavior. This paper presents a modeling and control framework for balancing humanoid robots in contact with a dynamic environment. We first model the robot and environment dynamics, together with the contact constraints. Then, a control strategy for stabilizing the full system is proposed. Theoretical results are ver…
One of the challenges for the robotics community is to deploy robots which can reliably operate in real world scenarios together with humans. A crucial requirement for legged robots is the capability to properly balance on their feet, rejecting external disturbances. iCub is a state-of-the-art humanoid robot which has only recently started to balance on its feet. While the current balancing controller has proved successful in various scenarios, it still misses the capability to properly react to strong pushes by taking steps. This paper goes in this direction. It proposes and implements a cont…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；DeepMind（深度思维）
The topic of physical human-robot interaction received a lot of attention from the robotics community because of many promising application domains. However, studying physical interaction between a robot and an external agent, like a human or another robot, without considering the dynamics of both the systems may lead to many short-comings in fully exploiting the interaction. In this paper, we present a coupled-dynamics formalism followed by a sound approach in exploiting helpful interaction with a humanoid robot. In particular, we propose the first attempt to define and exploit the human help…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
As technology advances, the barriers between the co-existence of humans and robots are slowly coming down. The prominence of physical interactions for collaboration and cooperation between humans and robots will be an undeniable fact. Rather than exhibiting simple reactive behaviors to human interactions, it is desirable to endow robots with augmented capabilities of exploiting human interactions for successful task completion. Towards that goal, in this paper, we propose a trajectory advancement approach in which we mathematically derive the conditions that facilitate advancing along a refere…
Balancing and reacting to strong and unexpected pushes is a critical requirement for humanoid robots. We recently designed a capture point based approach which interfaces with a momentum-based torque controller and we implemented and validated it on the iCub humanoid robot. In this work we implement a Receding Horizon control, also known as Model Predictive Control, to add the possibility to predict the future evolution of the robot, especially the constraints switching given by the hybrid nature of the system. We prove that the proposed MPC extension makes the step-recovery controller more ro…
In this chapter we describe the history and evolution of the iCub humanoid platform. We start by describing the first version as it was designed during the RobotCub EU project and illustrate how it evolved to become the platform that is adopted by more than 30 laboratories world wide. We complete the chapter by illustrating some of the research activities that are currently carried out on the iCub robot, i.e. visual perception, event driven sensing and dynamic control. We conclude the Chapter with a discussion of the lessons we learned and a preview of the upcoming next release of the robot, i…
Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）；University of Genova（热那亚大学）；University of Lethbridge（莱斯布里奇大学）
In the future robots will interact more and more with humans and will have to communicate naturally and efficiently. Automatic speech recognition systems (ASR) will play an important role in creating natural interactions and making robots better companions. Humans excel in speech recognition in noisy environments and are able to filter out noise. Looking at a person's face is one of the mechanisms that humans rely on when it comes to filtering speech in such noisy environments. Having a robot that can look toward a speaker could benefit ASR performance in challenging environments. To this aims…
Fondazione Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）
Jumping can be an effective way of locomotion to overcome small terrain gaps or obstacles. In this paper we propose two different approaches to perform jumps with a humanoid robot. Specifically, starting from a pre-defined CoM trajectory we develop the theory for a velocity controller and for a torque controller based on an optimization technique for the evaluation of the joints input. The controllers have been tested both in simulation and on the humanoid robot iCub. In simulation the robot was able to jump using both controllers, while the real system jumped with the velocity controller only…
Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）
Humans have an extraordinary ability to communicate and read the properties of objects by simply watching them being carried by someone else. This level of communicative skills and interpretation, available to humans, is essential for collaborative robots if they are to interact naturally and effectively. For example, suppose a robot is handing over a fragile object. In that case, the human who receives it should be informed of its fragility in advance, through an immediate and implicit message, i.e., by the direct modulation of the robot's action. This work investigates the perception of obje…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利技术研究院）；Universitá degli Studi di Genova（热那亚大学）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）
The importance of depth perception in the interactions that humans have within their nearby space is a well established fact. Consequently, it is also well known that the possibility of exploiting good stereo information would ease and, in many cases, enable, a large variety of attentional and interactive behaviors on humanoid robotic platforms. However, the difficulty of computing real-time and robust binocular disparity maps from moving stereo cameras often prevents from relying on this kind of cue to visually guide robots' attention and actions in real-world scenarios. The contribution of t…
A whole-body torque control framework adapted for balancing and walking tasks is presented in this paper. In the proposed approach, centroidal momentum terms are excluded in favor of a hierarchy of high-priority position and orientation tasks and a low-priority postural task. More specifically, the controller stabilizes the position of the center of mass, the orientation of the pelvis frame, as well as the position and orientation of the feet frames. The low-priority postural task provides reference positions for each joint of the robot. Joint torques and contact forces to stabilize tasks are …
Universitat Pompeu Fabra（庞培法布拉大学）；Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia（加泰罗尼亚生物工程研究所）；The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology（巴塞罗那科学技术学院）；Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats（加泰罗尼亚研究与高级研究学院）
This paper introduces a cognitive architecture for a humanoid robot to engage in a proactive, mixed-initiative exploration and manipulation of its environment, where the initiative can originate from both the human and the robot. The framework, based on a biologically-grounded theory of the brain and mind, integrates a reactive interaction engine, a number of state-of-the-art perceptual and motor learning algorithms, as well as planning abilities and an autobiographical memory. The architecture as a whole drives the robot behavior to solve the symbol grounding problem, acquire language capabil…
When balancing, a humanoid robot can be easily subjected to unexpected disturbances like external pushes. In these circumstances, reactive movements as steps become a necessary requirement in order to avoid potentially harmful falling states. In this paper we conceive a Model Predictive Controller which determines a desired set of contact wrenches by predicting the future evolution of the robot, while taking into account constraints switching in case of steps. The control inputs computed by this strategy, namely the desired contact wrenches, are directly obtained on the robot through a modific…
University of Cagliari（卡利亚里大学）；Pluribus One（Pluribus One 公司）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）
Deep neural networks have been widely adopted in recent years, exhibiting impressive performances in several application domains. It has however been shown that they can be fooled by adversarial examples, i.e., images altered by a barely-perceivable adversarial noise, carefully crafted to mislead classification. In this work, we aim to evaluate the extent to which robot-vision systems embodying deep-learning algorithms are vulnerable to adversarial examples, and propose a computationally efficient countermeasure to mitigate this threat, based on rejecting classification of anomalous inputs. We…
VANDAL Laboratory, Department of Computer, Management and Control Engineering (DIAG), Sapienza Rome University（VANDAL实验室，计算机、管理与控制工程系（DIAG），罗马萨皮恩扎大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）
A commercial robot, trained by its manufacturer to recognize a predefined number and type of objects, might be used in many settings, that will in general differ in their illumination conditions, background, type and degree of clutter, and so on. Recent computer vision works tackle this generalization issue through domain adaptation methods, assuming as source the visual domain where the system is trained and as target the domain of deployment. All approaches assume to have access to images from all classes of the target during training, an unrealistic condition in robotics applications. We ad…
University of Hamburg（汉堡大学）；Department of Informatics, Knowledge Technology Institute（信息学系、知识技术研究所）
Speech emotion recognition (SER) is an important aspect of effective human-robot collaboration and received a lot of attention from the research community. For example, many neural network-based architectures were proposed recently and pushed the performance to a new level. However, the applicability of such neural SER models trained only on in-domain data to noisy conditions is currently under-researched. In this work, we evaluate the robustness of state-of-the-art neural acoustic emotion recognition models in human-robot interaction scenarios. We hypothesize that a robot's ego noise, room co…
Would you let a humanoid play storytelling with your child? A usability study on LLM-powered narrative Human-Robot Interaction
Humanoid Sensing and Perception, Italian Institute of Technology (IIT)（人形感知与感知，意大利技术研究院）；Social Cognition in Human-Robot Interaction, IIT（人机交互中的社会认知，IIT）
Institute for Systems and Robotics, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa（里斯本大学高等理工学院系统与机器人研究所）；Faculty of Technical Sciences, University of Novi Sad（诺维萨德大学技术科学学院）
Human interaction involves very sophisticated non-verbal communication skills like understanding the goals and actions of others and coordinating our own actions accordingly. Neuroscience refers to this mechanism as motor resonance, in the sense that the perception of another person's actions and sensory experiences activates the observer's brain as if (s)he would be performing the same actions and having the same experiences. We analyze and model non-verbal cues (arm movements) exchanged between two humans that interact and execute handover actions. The contributions of this paper are the fol…
University of Genoa（热那亚大学）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利技术研究院）
When interacting with others in our everyday life, we prefer the company of those who share with us the same desire of closeness and intimacy (or lack thereof), since this determines if our interaction will be more o less pleasant. This sort of compatibility can be inferred by our innate attachment style. The attachment style represents our characteristic way of thinking, feeling and behaving in close relationship, and other than behaviourally, it can also affect us biologically via our hormonal dynamics. When we are looking how to enrich human-robot interaction (HRI), one potential solution c…
Game Theory to Study Cooperation in Human-Robot Mixed Groups: Exploring the Potential of the Public Good Game
Robotics Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department (RBCS), Italian Institute of Technology（机器人脑科学与认知科学部门（RBCS），意大利理工学院）；Cognitive Architecture for Collaborative Technologies (CONTACT) Unit, Italian Institute of Technology（协作技术认知架构（CONTACT）单元，意大利理工学院）；Department of Computer Science, Bioengineering, Robotics and Systems Engineering (DIBRIS), University of Genova（计算机科学、生物工程、机器人与系统工程部门（DIBRIS），热那亚大学）
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Loria（洛林计算机科学及其应用实验室）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Université de Lorraine（洛林大学）；TU Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；LIP6（LIP6实验室）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）；Sorbonne Universités（索邦大学）；UPMC Université Paris 06（巴黎第六大学）；Institut des Systèmes Intelligents et de Robotique (ISIR)（智能系统与机器人研究所）；Université Paris 8（巴黎第八大学）
Estimating the engagement is critical for human - robot interaction. Engagement measures typically rely on the dynamics of the social signals exchanged by the partners, especially speech and gaze. However, the dynamics of these signals is likely to be influenced by individual and social factors, such as personality traits, as it is well documented that they critically influence how two humans interact with each other. Here, we assess the influence of two factors, namely extroversion and negative attitude toward robots, on speech and gaze during a cooperative task, where a human must physically…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）
Skilled motor behavior is critical in many human daily life activities and professions. The design of robots that can effectively teach motor skills is an important challenge in the robotics field. In particular, it is important to understand whether the involvement in the training of a robot exhibiting social behaviors impacts on the learning and the experience of the human pupils. In this study, we addressed this question and we asked participants to learn a complex task - stabilizing an inverted pendulum - by training with physical assistance provided by a robotic manipulandum, the Wristbot…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；Czech Institute of Informatics, Robotics, and Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学捷克信息学、机器人学与控制论研究所）
Mechanism calibration is an important and non-trivial task in robotics. Advances in sensor technology make affordable but increasingly accurate devices such as cameras and tactile sensors available, making it possible to perform automated self-contained calibration relying on redundant information in these sensory streams. In this work, we use a simulated iCub humanoid robot with a stereo camera system and end-effector contact emulation to quantitatively compare the performance of kinematic calibration by employing different combinations of intersecting kinematic chains -- either through self-…
Mapping Embodied Affective Touch Strategies on a Humanoid Robot
Faculty of Engineering and Architecture（工程与建筑学院）；IDLab-AIRO, Ghent University – imec（IDLab-AIRO，根特大学 – imec）；Italian Institute of Technology（意大利理工学院）；School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（电气工程与计算机科学学院，皇家理工学院）
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin（柏林洪堡大学）；Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna（圣安娜高等研究学院）
This study presents a multisensory machine learning architecture for object recognition by employing a novel dataset that was constructed with the iCub robot, which is equipped with three cameras and a depth sensor. The proposed architecture combines convolutional neural networks to form representations (i.e., features) for grayscaled color images and a multi-layer perceptron algorithm to process depth data. To this end, we aimed to learn joint representations of different modalities (e.g., color and depth) and employ them for recognizing objects. We evaluate the performance of the proposed ar…
University of Granada（格拉纳达大学）；University Pierre & Marie Curie（皮埃尔和玛丽·居里大学）
We embed a spiking cerebellar model within an adaptive real-time (RT) control loop that is able to operate a real robotic body (iCub) when performing different vestibulo-ocular reflex (VOR) tasks. The spiking neural network computation, including event- and time-driven neural dynamics, neural activity, and spike-timing dependent plasticity (STDP) mechanisms, leads to a nondeterministic computation time caused by the neural activity volleys encountered during cerebellar simulation. This nondeterministic computation time motivates the integration of an RT supervisor module that is able to ensure…
Systematically developing high--quality reusable software components is a difficult task and requires careful design to find a proper balance between potential reuse, functionalities and ease of implementation. Extendibility is an important property for software which helps to reduce cost of development and significantly boosts its reusability. This work introduces an approach to enhance components reusability by extending their functionalities using plug-ins at the level of the connection points (ports). Application--dependent functionalities such as data monitoring and arbitration can be imp…
A Multimodal Neural Network for Recognizing Subjective Self-Disclosure Towards Social Robots
Amazon（亚马逊）；School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Glasgow（心理学与神经科学学院，格拉斯哥大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（内盖夫本·古里安大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Human collaborators coordinate effectively their actions through both verbal and non-verbal communication. We believe that the the same should hold for human-robot teams. We propose a formalism that enables a robot to decide optimally between doing a task and issuing an utterance. We focus on two types of utterances: verbal commands, where the robot expresses how it wants its human teammate to behave, and state-conveying actions, where the robot explains why it is behaving this way. Human subject experiments show that enabling the robot to issue verbal commands is the most effective form of co…
Most research on human-robot handovers focuses on the development of comfortable and efficient HRI; few have studied handover failures. If a failure occurs in the beginning of the interaction, it prevents the whole handover process and destroys trust. Here we analyze the underlying reasons why people want explanations in a handover scenario where a robot cannot possess the object. Results suggest that participants set expectations on their request and that a robot should provide explanations rather than non-verbal cues after failing. Participants also expect that their handover request can be …
In this paper a neuro-robotics model capable of counting using gestures is introduced. The contribution of gestures to learning to count is tested with various model and training conditions. Two studies were presented in this article. In the first, we combine different modalities of the robot's neural network, in the second, a novel training procedure for it is proposed. The model is trained with pointing data from an iCub robot simulator. The behaviour of the model is in line with that of human children in terms of performance change depending on gesture production.
Stochastic Decision-Making Framework for Human-Robot Collaboration in Industrial Applications
Department of Control and Instrumentation Engineering, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（控制与仪器工程系，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）；Interdisciplinary Research Center for Intelligent Manufacturing & Robotics, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM)（智能制造与机器人交叉研究中心，国王法赫德石油与矿物大学）
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；University of Genoa（热那亚大学）
Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. I…
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia（意大利理工学院）；The University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；INAIL（意大利国家工伤事故保险研究所）；Honda R&D Co., Ltd.（本田研发有限公司）
Humans show specialized strategies for efficient collaboration. Transferring similar strategies to humanoid robots can improve their capability to interact with other agents, leading the way to complex collaborative scenarios with multiple agents acting on a shared environment. In this paper we present a control framework for robot-robot collaborative lifting. The proposed shared controller takes into account the joint action of both the robots thanks to a centralized controller that communicates with them, and solves the whole-system optimization. Efficient collaboration is ensured by taking …
University of Plymouth（普利茅斯大学）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；AIST-AIRC（日本产业技术综合研究所人工智能研究中心）；Sheffield Hallam University（谢菲尔德哈勒姆大学）
In this paper, a novel neuro-robotics model capable of counting real items is introduced. The model allows us to investigate the interaction between embodiment and numerical cognition. This is composed of a deep neural network capable of image processing and sequential tasks performance, and a robotic platform providing the embodiment - the iCub humanoid robot. The network is trained using images from the robot's cameras and proprioceptive signals from its joints. The trained model is able to count a set of items and at the same time points to them. We investigate the influence of pointing on …
