Speaker: Wafa Johal, Post Doc researcher at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Abstract: While robots show great performance in industrial environments, the recent introduction of service robots in our everyday life brings new challenges to research in the field of human-robot interaction. Autonomous robots need not only to take into account the environment and its task, but also to take decisions according to the user that they are interacting with.
During this talk, I will present technical challenges and examples from some of our projects in which robotic devices allow an increase of the users’ engagement in a task. I will also present possible behavioural adaptation methods used to provide a more customized system to the users. My focus will be on the currently ongoing projects at the CHILI Lab at EPFL where we investigate learners’ interaction with robotic devices. We use the robot’s ability of physical and kinetic interaction to engage and provide additional feedback during learning activities.