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Purpose Many work conditions require manipulators to open cabinet doors and then gain access to the desired workspace. However, after opening, the unlocked doors can easily close, interrupt a task and potentially break the operating end-effectors. This paper aims to address a manipulator's behavior planning problem for responding to a dynamic workspace released by door opening. Design/methodology/approach A dynamic model of the restricted workspace released by an unlocked door is established. As a whole system to treat, the interactions between the workspace and robot are analyzed by using a partially observable Markov decision process. A self-protective policy decision executed as a belief tree is proposed. To respond to the policy, this study has designed three types of actions: stay on guard in the workspace, using an elbow joint to defense the door and linear escape out of the workspace for self-protection by observing collision risk levels to trigger them. Finally, this study proposes self-protective motion controllers based on risk time optimization to act to the planned actions. Findings The elbow defense could balance robotic safety and work efficiency by interrupting the end-effector's work and using the elbow joint to prevent the door-closing in an active collision way. Compared with the stay and escape action, the advantage of the elbow defense is having a predictable performance to quick callback the interrupted work after the risk was relieved. Originality/value This work provides guidance for the safe operation of a class of robot operations and the upgrade of motion planning.

Telemanipulation in power stations commonly require robots first to open doors and then gain access to a new workspace. However, the opened doors can easily close by disturbances, interrupt the operations, and potentially lead to collision damages. Although existing telemanipulation is a highly efficient master–slave work pattern due to human-in-the-loop control, it is not trivial for a user to specify the optimal measures to guarantee safety. This paper investigates the safety-critical motion planning and control problem to balance robotic safety against manipulation performance during work emergencies. Based on a dynamic workspace released by door-closing, the interactions between the workspace and robot are analyzed using a partially observable Markov decision process, thereby making the balance mechanism executed as belief tree planning. To act the planning, apart from telemanipulation actions, we clarify other three safety-guaranteed actions: on guard, defense and escape for self-protection by estimating collision risk levels to trigger them. Besides, our experiments show that the proposed method is capable of determining multiple solutions for balancing robotic safety and work efficiency during telemanipulation tasks.

A key question in transportation research is whether drivers show behavioral adaptation, that is, slower or faster driving, when new technology is introduced into the vehicle. This study investigates behavioral adaptation in response to the sport mode, a technology that alters the vehicle's auditory, throttle-mapping, power-steering, and chassis settings. Based on the literature, it can be hypothesized that the sport mode increases perceived sportiness and encourages faster driving. Oppositely, the sport mode may increase drivers’ perceived danger, homeostatically causing them to drive more slowly. These hypotheses were tested using an instrumented vehicle on a test track. Thirty-one drivers were asked to drive as they normally would with different sport mode settings: Baseline, Modified Throttle Mapping (MTM), Artificial Engine Sound enhancement (AESe), MTM and AESe combined (MTM-AESe), and MTM, AESe combined with four-wheel steering, increased damping, and decreased power steering (MTM-AESe-4WS). Post-trial questionnaires showed increased perceived sportiness but no differences in perceived danger for the three MTM conditions compared to Baseline. Furthermore, compared to Baseline, MTM led to higher vehicle accelerations and, with a smaller effect size, a higher time-percentage of driving above the 110 km/h speed limit, but not higher cornering speeds. The AESe condition did not significantly affect perceived sportiness, perceived danger, and driving speed compared to Baseline. These findings suggest that behavioral adaptation is a functional and opportunistic phenomenon rather than mediated by perceived sportiness or perceived danger.

The articles in this special section focuses on the use of socially assistive robots for use in the healthcare industry. Due to the serious shortage of healthcare professionals, socially assistive robots are proving themselves a viable complementary tool to address this demand. Motivated by these concerns and the benefits of using robotic systems to provide customized help, the goal of this special issue is to provide a snapshot of state-of-the-art advancements and recent novel results in the field of socially assistive robotics.

The human gestures occur spontaneously and usually they are aligned with speech, which leads to a natural and expressive interaction. Speech-driven gesture generation is important in order to enable a social robot to exhibit social cues and conduct a successful human-robot interaction. In this paper, the generation process involves mapping acoustic speech representation to the corresponding gestures for a humanoid robot. The paper proposes a new GAN (Generative Adversarial Network) architecture for speech to gesture generation. Instead of the fixed mapping from one speech to one gesture pattern, our end-to-end GAN structure can generate multiple mapped gestures patterns from one speech (with multiple noises) just like humans do. The generated gestures can be applied to social robots with arms. The evaluation result shows the effectiveness of our generative model for speech-driven robot gesture generation.

International audience; Creating a convincing affective robot behavior is a challenging task. In this paper, we are trying to coordinate between different modalities of communication: speech, facial expressions, and gestures to make the robot interact with human users in an expressive manner. The proposed system employs videos to induce target emotions in the participants so as to start interactive discussions between each participant and the robot around the content of each video. During each experiment of interaction, the expressive ALICE robot generates an adapted multimodal behavior to the affective content of the video, and the participant evaluates its characteristics at the end of the experiment. This study discusses the multimodality of the robot behavior and its positive effect on the clarity of the emotional content of interaction. Moreover, it provides personality and gender-based evaluations of the emotional ex-pressivity of the generated behavior so as to investigate the way it was perceived by the introverted-extroverted and male-female participants within a human-robot interaction context.

International audience; Most of recent researches on the automotive field focus on autonomous vehicles. These vehicles are equipped with conventional chassis systems. The goal is to control the vehicle's traction, brakes, and front steering. This paper discusses the importance of advanced chassis systems, as driving/braking torque vectoring, for both autonomous and non-autonomous vehicles, especially in a race mode. Reliable co-simulation results show that expanding the vehicle's potential leads to high performances and safety with respect to severe situations when optimal control allocation is ensured. Therefore, future passenger cars shall not only be equipped with additional sensors, but also by advanced systems along with adequate control algorithms.

International audience; Most of automotive researches are focused on autonomous vehicles. Both industrials and academics are working on several changes, and the way to coordinate the increasing number of chassis systems is one among them. This paper proposes a more suitable control architecture for autonomous vehicles complexity. This architecture is based on control allocation techniques developed especially to handle over-actuated systems. The allocation is made by taking into account the tire dynamics couplings through a new linear tire model with varying parameters. Simulations of combined manoeuvres proved the potential of this architecture and its relevance for future autonomous vehicles.

International audience; This special issue aims at examining and promoting recent developments in the Assistive/Social Robotics field and future directions including the related challenges and how these can be overcome with particular focus on computational intelligence methodologies. With robots being integrated more and more in our environments and daily activities, the effectiveness of robotics applications has to rely on robots' ability to perceive, reason, and adapt on-the-fly to the users' behavior and needs. In particular, the development of personal robots, as assistive technological tools, challenges researchers to develop socially intelligent and adaptive robots that can collaborate with people in real environment. This special issue is comprised of 14 papers, fostering discussions and investigations in robot behavior adaptation and learning, in socially assistive robotics, and in developing reliable systems for natural interactions between humans and robots. Several aspects and perspectives are taken into consideration by the authors covering various topics such as adaptability during real-world human-robot interactions ; new reinforcement learning and learning by teaching techniques especially used in the context of child-robot interaction ; social robot responses, perception and adaptation by means of a semantic representation; robots acceptability and security. Furthermore, several assistive applications for the elderly, children, and people are presented. B Mariacarla Staffa

International audience; As we are heading towards autonomous vehicles, additional driver assistance systems are being added. The vehicle motion is automated step by step to ensure passengers' safety and comfort, while still preserving vehicle performance. However, simultaneous activations of concurrent systems may conflict, and non-suitable behavior may emerge. Our research work consists in proving that with the right coordination approach, simultaneous operation of different systems improve the vehicle's performance and avoid the emergence of unwanted conflicts. To prove this, we gathered different control architectures implemented in commercial passenger cars, and we compared them with our control architecture using a unified reference vehicle model. The high-fidelity vehicle model is developed in Simcenter Amesim in a modular and extensible manner. This enables adding systems in a plug-and-play way. Not only different control architectures can be tested on the same vehicle, but also different systems combinations can be evaluated. In this research, the vehicle can steer at the front and at the rear, and each wheel can be braked independently. Each of the actuators concerned can influence the vehicle's yaw rate leading in some cases in system conflicts. More complex control strategies are then implemented in Matlab/Simulink, and co-simulations are carried between both softwares in order to provide realistic results. It has been shown that optimal control allocation algorithms are more suitable to coordinate systems in an over-actuated vehicle. Moreover, if the optimization objectives are well formalized, performance, safety and comfort can be improved since the vehicle can benefit from the systems' synergies.

International audience; Interaction plays a critical role in skills learning for natural communication. In human-robot interaction (HRI), robots can get feedback during the interaction to improve their social abilities. In this context, we propose an interactive robot learning framework using mul-timodal data from thermal facial images and human gait data for online emotion recognition. We also propose a new decision-level fusion method for the multimodal classification using Random Forest (RF) model. Our hybrid online emotion recognition model focuses on the detection of four human emotions (i.e., neutral, happiness, angry, and sadness). After conducting offline training and testing with the hybrid model, the accuracy of the online emotion recognition system is more than 10% lower than the offline one. In order to improve our system, the human verbal feedback is injected into the robot interactive learning. With the new online emotion recognition system, a 12.5% accuracy increase compared with the online system without interactive robot learning is obtained.

International audience; Several systems are integrated in passenger cars. Some of them are just redundant systems due to safety requirements. Others, are completely different and can interact with each other as long as they are operating inside the same vehicle. Control allocation methods have been successfully implemented in advanced aircrafts to avoid conflicts, especially in the context of redundant systems. In this paper, we will rather focus on coordinating non-redundant advanced chassis systems with different dynamics. This difference in dynamics can be especially problematic when systems exhibit different communication delays. Model Predictive Control Allocation (MPCA) methods are therefore investigated in order to activate the right system at the right moment. Results show that particularly when the most effective system is saturated, another system with a different time delay can be activated few steps before saturation to instantly take over the maneuver. With good knowledge of actuator dynamics and higher computation power, MPCA methods are able to solve complex problems in severe situations.

International audience; Many car manufacturers are equipping their vehicles with advanced systems to win the race towards autonomous vehicles. In order to ensure multiple objectives, different embedded systems influencing differently the same physical variable are often implemented in the same vehicle. Most of car manufacturers tend to activate one system at a time, especially when the low-level control of actuators is developed by different equipment suppliers, making the inner dynamics uncertain. However, this limits the potential of the vehicle. This paper discusses the feasibility of coordinating these systems when activated at the same time, while ensuring an acceptable robustness regarding the uncertain dynamics. Results showed good performance in severe maneuvers when combining robust control synthesis and optimization-based control allocation algorithms. Therefore, several embedded systems may be activated at the same time to expand the overall potential of the vehicle and deal with more difficult situations.

Research related to regulatory focus theory has shown that the way in which a message is conveyed can increase the effectiveness of the message. While different research fields have used this theory, in human-robot interaction (HRI), no real attention has been given to this theory. In this paper, we investigate it in an in the wild scenario. More specifically, we are interested in how individuals react when a robot suddenly appears at their office doors. Will they interact with it or will they ignore it? We report the results from our experimental study in which the robot approaches 42 individuals. Twenty-nine of them interacted with the robot, while the others either ignored it or avoided any interaction with it. The robot displayed two types of behavior (i.e., promotion or prevention). Our results show that individuals that interacted with a robot that matched their regulatory focus type interacted with it significantly longer than individuals that did not experience regulatory fit. Other qualitative results are also reported, together with some reactions from the participants.

Current predictors of fuel consumption are typically based on computer simulations or data collections in real traffic, where the route and vehicle type are not under the researcher’s control. Here, we predicted fuel consumption using test track data, an approach that allowed for location-specific predictions. Ninety-one drivers drove a total of 4617 laps, in two vehicles (Renault Megane, Renault Clio), on two routes (highway and mountain), and with two eco-driving instructions (normal and eco). A multivariate analysis at the level of laps showed a strong predictive value for metrics related to speed, RPM, and throttle position, but with a considerable amount of variance attributable to route and vehicle type. A subsequent location-specific analysis showed that the predictive correlation of driving speed and throttle position fluctuated strongly during the lap and at some locations even became negative. We conclude that there is considerable potential in instantaneous location-specific prediction of fuel consumption.

International audience; We design a personalized human-robot environment for social learning for individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). In order to define an individual�s profile, we posit that the individual�s reliance on proprioceptive and kinematic visual cues should affect the way the individual suffering from ASD interacts with a social agent (human/robot/virtual agent). In this paper, we assess the potential link between recognition performances of body/facial expressions of emotion of increasing complexity, emotion recognition on platforms with different visual features (two mini-humanoid robots, a virtual agent, and a human), and proprioceptive and visual cues integration of an individual. First, we describe the design of the EMBODI-EMO database containing videos of controlled body/facial expressions of emotions from various platforms. We explain how we validated this database with typically developed (TD) individuals. Then, we investigate the relationship between emotion recognition and proprioceptive and visual profiles of TD individuals and individuals with ASD. For TD individuals, our results indicate a relationship between profiles and emotion recognition. As expected, we show that TD individuals that rely more heavily on visual cues yield better recognition scores. However, we found that TD individuals relying on proprioception have better recognition scores, going against our hypothesis. Finally, participants with ASD relying more heavily on proprioceptive cues have lower emotion recognition scores on all conditions than participants relying on visual cues.

International audience; Many research projects are focusing on automated vehicles and reinventing the automotive industry. New technologies are introduced, and the pillars of the ground vehicle are revisited and new challenges appeared. This paper focuses on the chassis systems and their control strategies. While assistance strategies use to manage specific operations, autonomous vehicles need to handle simultaneous operations. Optimal solutions for systems coordination are discussed in this paper. Results show that the more we get closer to full autonomous driving where an important number of embedded systems is needed, the more optimal coordination strategies are relevant. These strategies should be considered in the upcoming automotive industrial standards.

International audience; Most of today's passenger cars are over-actuated. This over-actuation is expected to grow going towards self-driving cars. However, the necessary systems that would be needed for a safe and a comfortable autonomous driving remain uncertain. This paper aims to provide an extensible control architecture that does not depend on a particular system combination. Car manufacturers tend to develop ad hoc rule-based strategies for a specific set of integrated systems. Through several realistic scenarios, we have shown that the control architecture proposed in this paper can be adopted for different set of integrated systems. A minimal effort is required from the control designer when changing the nature of the systems integrated to adapt the control strategy. The control architecture proposed in this paper can serve as a starting point for the standardization of control architectures for future vehicles motion control.

Several modern vehicles provide the option to select a driving mode. However, the literature contains no empirical studies that investigate how driving modes affect the vehicle's dynamic behaviour in regular on-road driving. We examined for which CAN-bus signals the differences between Renault's Multi-Sense® comfort and sport modes are most apparent. We gathered data on a 26.3 km route containing a rural and highway section. A single person drove the route four times in comfort mode and four times in sport mode. By statistically analysing and ordering 887 CAN-bus signals, we found strong differences between the two modes for rear-wheel angle, engine torque, longitudinal acceleration, and vertical motion. Parameter identification of a quarter car model identified a 3.5 times higher damping coefficient for the sport mode compared to the comfort mode. Due to four wheel steering, compared to the comfort mode, the sport mode yielded a higher lateral acceleration and yaw rate for a given steering wheel angle and driving speed. In conclusion, this study provides quantitative insight into the extent to which the Multi-Sense driving modes impact the vehicle's lateral, longitudinal, and vertical dynamic behaviour. The results and the analysis methods help guide future driving mode designs.

International audience; Autonomous vehicles are round the corner. Most of car manufacturers are racing to become a leader in this promising market. In this paper, we focus on one of the remaining challenges to be overcome, namely, the control of vehicle motion when friction varies. Researchers tend to estimate the friction coefficient using complex observers based on simple mathematical equation. We believe that by taken into account some formerly simplified dynamics, as roll dynamics, we can reduce the estimations' errors, and therefore use simple observers. Co-simulations of the control logic with a high-fidelity vehicle model proved the relevance of this method. Results showed that the vehicle can be controlled in severe conditions while the friction changes using only today's passenger cars sensors. Vertical dynamics should therefore be taken into account even for plane motions.

International audience; Vehicle motion control has many challenges to overcome. One of the main problems is robustness against not only environmental changes but also uncertainties about the vehicle itself. This paper focuses on this problem using robust control design at the control architecture's high level. Researches tend to decentralize the control to treat longitudinal and lateral dynamics separately. Here, an overall vehicle model is first proposed and studied to justify the structure that the high-level controller should embrace. Co-simulation results of different combinations showed promising performances to face uncertainties and couplings. Therefore, robust techniques combined with control allocation techniques may enhance autonomous vehicles reliability.

International audience; This paper investigates how individuals react in a situation when an experimenter (human or robot) either tells them to stop in the middle of playing the Jenga game, or accidentally bumps into a table and makes the tower fall down. The mood of the participants and different physiological parameters (i.e., galvanic skin response (GSR) and facial temperature variation) are extracted and analysed based on the condition, experimenter, and psychological questionnaires (i.e., TEQ, TEIQ, RST-PQ). This study was a between participants study with 23 participants. Our results show that multiple GSR parameters (e.g., latency, amplitude, number of peaks) differ significantly based on the condition and the experimenter the participants interacted with. The temperature variation in three regions of interest (i.e., forehead, left, and right periorbital regions) are good indicators of how ready an individual is to react in an unforeseen situation.

International audience; — Enabling robots to determine how physiological parameters vary in relation to the profile of an individual can lead to a better adaptation of the behavior of the robot to the needs of the individual it interacts with. This paper investigates how physiological parameters (i.e., blinking, galvanic skin response (GSR), facial temperature variation) vary in a news reading task, based on various types of stimuli (i.e., auditory and visual) that TIAGo robot uses to present the news. The results from a within participant study with 11 participants are reported. We also consider the impact of personality and the user sensory profile (based on Adult and Adolescent Sensory Profile (AASP)) for the physiological parameters variation. Our results show that blinking is the main physiological parameter that varies in the non-stressing task of news reading.

International audience; Redundancy of integrated systems has always been used in order to increase vehicle's safety. Some new technologies are however too expensive to be redundant. This paper proposes a new way to preserve the safety by enabling a kind of complementarity between different chassis systems. Optimization-based control allocation redistribution algorithms are used in order to find the best way to combine conflicted systems. Results have shown that one system can take over another one when a failure occurs making the control logic fault-tolerant and reconfigurable. This suits better future cars as additional chassis systems are intended to be integrated.

International audience; A key factor of a successful Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is the robot's ability to understand the messages transmitted by a human user, especially their nonverbal and paraverbal components. Our work focuses on the robot's ability to detect if a person is deceitful or honest, based on an evaluation of their physiological state and using only noninvasive techniques, such as thermal and RGB-D imaging. In particular, we currently study and evaluate several physiological manifestations during an experiment consisting of an interrogation conducted by a robot that follows a mock-up crime, then correlate them with the truth values of the participants' answers. The first results are promising.

International audience; — In the context of a worldwide aging population, it is important to find solutions to help the elderly maintain their cognitive functions. This research was done in the context of the ENRICHME. We investigate the outcome of a 5 day intensive cognitive stimulation with an elderly individual. Each day was composed of two sessions (one at 11am, and one at 3pm). During each session the participant played three cognitive games (i.e., digit cancellation, integer matrix task, Stroop game), two of them having two difficulty levels. The mood of the participant was also recorded before and after each interaction session. Evidence was found that even after a few sessions, the performance of the participant increased for all games. The performance of each game and each difficulty level was analyzed based on the interaction time (11am or 3pm) and the interaction day. A detailed analysis of the performance is presented together with a discussion of these results.

International audience; Most of automotive researches focus on autonomous vehicles. Studies regarding trajectory planning and trajectory tracking became preponderant. As in case of commercial ground vehicles there is a driver in the loop, one should raise the important question of how the trajectory should be tracked. In this paper, we investigate the influence of controlling integrated chassis systems on the vehicle's behavior. A fixed Model Predictive Control is used to track the trajectory. Tunable vehicle motion control is however used to provide different motion feelings. Results show that a specific trajectory could be followed in different manners. Therefore, vehicle dynamics can be and should be controlled in such a way to generate adaptive trust feelings to passengers in case of autonomous driving.

International audience; Most of the chassis systems are developed by automotive suppliers to improve a specific vehicle performance. Drivers, and consequently vehicle manufacturers, are more concerned by the overall behaviour of the Vehicle. Many coordination architectures have been proposed in the literature in order to integrate different chassis systems in a single vehicle. In this paper , these architectures are compared and discussed. Two major classes are proposed: Downstream and Upstream Coordination. The purpose of this classification is to help car manufacturers and suppliers standardize an Integrated Vehicle Dynamics Control architecture for faster and more flexible designs.

International audience; —A large interest has recently been given to global chassis control. This requires a tire model adapted to control synthesis that can represent combined slip. In this paper, a new suitable tire model for vehicle coupled operations control is proposed. The existing models are either too simple to represent coupled behaviors or too complex to allow control synthesis. This new tire model takes benefits from both approaches, as it is linear with varying parameters. Simulations of coupled operations proved the model accuracy in the tire stable range and its promising potential for global chassis control synthesis.

The purpose of this research paper is to study and develop a system that is able to help identify problems and improve human rehabilitation after traumatic injuries. Traumatic injuries in human's lower limbs can occur over a life time and can have serious side effects if they are not treated correctly. In this paper, we developed an intelligent cane (IntelliCane) so as to help individuals in their rehabilitation process and provide feedback to the users. The first stage of the paper involves an analysis of the existing systems on the market and what can be improved. The second stage presents the design of the system. The third part, which is still under development is the validation of the system in real world setups with people in need. This paper presents mainly stages one and two.

International audience; The EU H2020 ENRICHME project is aimed at developing a socially assistive robot that can adapt its behavior based on the profile of the individual it interacts with. In this paper, we investigate how the ENRICHME project web-based News Application can be adapted based on the sensory profile and personality of the individual. The interaction between the robot and the individual takes place at three different distances (70cm, 1.2m, and 2m). The robot can use visual (showing or not showing the news on its touchscreen) and auditory (reading the news out loud) stimuli during the interaction. We looked at different physiological parameters (blinking, heart rate, respiration rate, and GSR) and we can report that we found statistical results that show that the physiological parameters vary based on interaction distance, condition, sensory profile, and personality.

International audience; Robots have increasingly been used for improving the quality of life of people with special needs, such as people suffering from Mild Cognitive Impairment, elderly, people with different physical and cognitive abilities. In this paper, we propose a method for extracting and analyzing physiological data by using contactless sensors (i.e., RGB and thermal cameras). The physiological parameters that can be analyzed are: the respiration rate, blinking rate, and the temperature variation across different regions on the face (i.e., the forehead, the nose, the peri-nasal region, the left and right periorbital regions, and the entire face). These parameters, together with the action units (AUs) can be indicators of the current internal state of an user. We analyze data from three different scenarios and report the results obtained.

For a greater acceptance of robots in home-like environments, there is a great need to adapt the behaviors of the robots to the profiles of the individuals they interact with. In this paper, we investigate the impact of the sensory profile of an individual over the robot styles of interaction displayed by a humanoid robot in a non-verbal word-color Stroop task. The style of interaction is based on different visual and auditory stimuli. The results of a within participants study carried out with 30 participants are reported. Our study suggests that the sensory profile of an individual should be taken into consideration when deciding the style of interaction between a robot and the person. We found statistical results that suggest that there is a difference in performance based on having either a low or high auditory category type.

International audience; In this chapter, we presented a method to define individual profiles in order to develop a new personalized robot‐based social interaction for individual with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) with the hypothesis that hyporeactivity to visual motion and an overreliance on proprioceptive information would be linked to difficulties in integrating social cues and in engaging in successful interactions. We succeed to form three groups among our 19 participants (children, teenagers, and adults with ASD), describing each participant's response to visual and proprioceptive inputs. We conducted a first experiment to present the robot Nao as a social companion and to avoid fear or stress toward the robot in future experiment. No direct link between the behavior of the participants toward the robot and their proprioceptive and visual profiles was observed. Still, we found encouraging results going in the direction of our hypothesis. In addition, almost all of our participants showed great interest to Nao. Defining such individual profiles prior to social interactions with a robot could provide promising strategies for designing successful and adapted human‐robot interaction (HRI) for individuals with ASD.

International audience; The main purpose of the ENRICHME European project is to develop a socially assistive robot that can help the elderly, adapt to their needs, and has a natural behavior. In this paper, we present some of the lessons learnt from the first interaction between the robot and two elderly people from one partner care facility (LACE Housing Ltd, UK). The robot interacted with the two participants for almost one hour. A tremendous amount of sensory data was recorded from the multi-sensory system (i.e., audio data, RGB-D data, thermal images, and the data from the skeleton tracker) for better understanding the interaction, the needs, the reactions of the users, and the context. This data was processed offline. Before the interaction between the two elderly residents and the robot, a demo was shown to all the residents of the facility. The reactions of the residents were positive and they found the robot useful. The first lessons learnt from this interaction between Kompa¨ıKompa¨ı robot and the elderly are reported.

This paper presents a series of 4 single subject experiments aimed to investigate whether children with autism show more social engagement when interacting with the Nao robot, compared to a human partner in a motor imitation task. The Nao robot imitates gross arm movements of the child in real-time. Different behavioral criteria (i.e. eye gaze, gaze shifting, free initiations and prompted initiations of arm movements, and smile/laughter) were analyzed based on the video data of the interaction. The results are mixed and suggest a high variability in reactions to the Nao robot. The results are as follows: For Child2 and Child3, the results indicate no effect of the Nao robot in any of the target variables. Child1 and Child4 showed more eye gaze and smile/laughter in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the human partner and Child1 showed a higher frequency of motor initiations in the interaction with the Nao robot compared to the baselines, but not with respect to the human-interaction. The robot proved to be a better facilitator of shared attention only for Child1. Keywords: human-robot interaction; assistive robotics; autism

International audience; In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios , an intelligent robot should be able to synthesize an appropriate behavior adapted to human profile (i.e., personality). Recent research studies discussed the effect of personality traits on human verbal and nonverbal behaviors. The dynamic characteristics of the generated gestures and postures during the nonverbal communication can differ according to personality traits, which similarly can influence the verbal content of human speech. This research tries to map human verbal behavior to a corresponding verbal and nonverbal combined robot behavior based on the extraversion-introversion personality dimension. We explore the human-robot personality matching aspect and the similarity attraction principle, in addition to the different effects of the adapted combined robot behavior expressed through speech and gestures, and the adapted speech-only robot behavior, on interaction. Experiments with the humanoid NAO robot are reported.

International audience; In human-human interaction, three modalities of communication (i.e., verbal, nonverbal, and paraverbal) are naturally coordinated so as to enhance the meaning of the conveyed message. In this paper, we try to create a similar coordination between these modalities of communication in order to make the robot behave as naturally as possible. The proposed system uses a group of videos in order to elicit specific target emotions in a human user, upon which interactive narratives will start (i.e., interactive discussions between the participant and the robot around each video's content). During each interaction experiment, the humanoid expressive ALICE robot engages and generates an adapted multimodal behavior to the emotional content of the projected video using speech, head-arm metaphoric gestures, and/or facial expressions. The interactive speech of the robot is synthesized using Mary-TTS (text to speech toolkit), which is used-in parallel-to generate adapted head-arm gestures [1]. This synthesized multimodal robot behavior is evaluated by the interacting human at the end of each emotion-eliciting experiment. The obtained results validate the positive effect of the generated robot behavior multimodality on interaction.

International audience; Our research aims to develop a new personalized social interaction model between a humanoid robot and an individual suffering of Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD), so as to enhance his/her social and communication skills. In order to define individual's profile, we posit that the individual's reliance to proprioceptive and kinematic visual cues will affect the way an individual suffering of ASD interacts with a social agent.We describe a first experiment that defines each participant 's perceptive-cognitive and sensorimotor profile with respect to the integration of visual inputs, thanks to the Sensory Profile questionnaire and an experimental set-up. We succeeded to form 3 groups with significant different behavioural responses inside our subject pool formed by 7 adults and 6 children with ASD. In a second experiment, we presented the Nao robot to all of our participants. We video-analysed their behaviours and compared them to the profil es we defined. In view of our results, this first interaction confirmed our hypothesis: participants with a weak proprioceptive integration and strong visual dependency had more successful interaction than participants with an overreliance on proprioceptive input and hypo-reactivity to visual cues

International audience; An intelligent robot needs to be able to understand human emotions, and to understand and generate actions through cognitive systems that operate in a similar way to human cognition. In this chapter, we mainly focus on developing an online incremental learning system of emotions using Takagi-Sugeno (TS) fuzzy model. Additionally, we present a general overview for understanding and generating multimodal actions from the cognitive point of view. The main objective of this system is to detect whether the observed emotion needs a new corresponding multi-modal action to be generated in case it constitutes a new emotion cluster not learnt before, or it can be attributed to one of the existing actions in memory in case it belongs to an existing cluster.

International audience; In the wake of fast aging of populations the question is asked about the acceptance of robots by elderly individuals and their role in elderly’s every-day life. The project ENRICHME - Enabling Robot and assisted living environment for Independent Care and Health Monitoring of the Elderly (which receives funding from the European Union H2020 Programme; Grant Agreement No: 643691C) employs a mobile service robot for long-term human monitoring and interaction, in order to optimise the independence of elderly individuals. For this reason, it is important to explore and assess the impact of such a system on the final users’ life (elderly, caregivers, social reference group). Thus, the aim of the study was to develop a tool to collect opinions about the robot-related requirements and check its usefulness.In this paper, we present the first results of the Users’ Needs, Requirements and Abilities Questionnaire (UNRAQ). The tool was developed based on the literature review and ENRICHME researcher’s expertise. Data collected by means of a creativity box - a part of the UNRAQ enabling the participants to express freely their ideas, worries, and critical opinions are presented. During the interviews pictures of the prototype of the robot were shown to the participants so as to provide them with a more realistic view of the robot concept. Data were collected in the countries involved in the ENRICHME project: France, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Poland, and UK. However, so far only the results gathered from Polish participants are included. The results gathered from only 166 Polish participants are presented here.The analysis of opinions presented in the creativity box was used to identify five areas: general attitudes towards the robot, expectations regarding the appearance of the robot, expected functions, conditions for safe use of the robot and controversies related to the introduction of robots into the lives of the elderly.In conclusion: based on the preliminary results it can be stated that the use of robots by community-dwelling elderly is generally accepted both by the elderly themselves and younger people: formal and informal caregivers. The survey participants showed willingness to cooperate with researchers in the interviews and expressed their ideas and thoughts. The study results point to the necessity of involvement of end-users and secondary users in the process of designing technological solutions.

The recent trend toward developing a new generation of robots that are capable of moving and acting in human-centered environments, interacting with people, and participating in our daily lives has introduced the need for building robotic systems able to learn how to use their bodies to communicate and to react to their users in a social and engaging way. Social robots that interact with humans have thus become an important focus of robotics research.

International audience; Recently, there is an encouraging trend in adopting model-driven engineering approaches for software development in robotics research. In this paper, currently available model-driven techniques in robotics are analyzed with respect to the domain-specific requirements. A conceptual overview of our software development approach called 'Self Adaptive Framework for Robotic Systems (SafeRobots)' is explained and we also try to position our approach within this model ecosystem.

International audience; In human-human interaction, the process of communication can be established through three modalities: verbal, non-verbal (i.e., gestures), and/or para-verbal (i.e., prosody). The linguistic literature shows that the para-verbal and non-verbal cues are naturally aligned and synchronized, however the natural mechanism of this synchronization is still unexplored. The difficulty encountered during the coordination between prosody and metaphoric head-arm gestures concerns the conveyed meaning , the way of performing gestures with respect to prosodic characteristics, their relative temporal arrangement, and their coordinated organization in the phrasal structure of utterance. In this research, we focus on the mechanism of mapping between head-arm gestures and speech prosodic characteristics in order to generate an adaptive robot behavior to the interacting human's emotional state. Prosody patterns and the motion curves of head-arm gestures are aligned separately into parallel Hidden Markov Models (HMM). The mapping between speech and head-arm gestures is based on the Coupled Hidden Markov Models (CHMM), which could be seen as a multi-stream collection of HMM, characterizing the segmented prosody and head-arm gestures' data. An emotional state based audio-video database has been created for the validation of this study. The obtained results show the effectiveness of the proposed methodology.

International audience; A good adjustable control system is a system that can adapt its behaviors according to the user's state over time. While most researches in Human-Robot Cooperation focus on making the robotic system more efficient and effective in task accomplishment, we argue that very few works tried to model the human operator. In this paper, we discuss several aspects related to the human operator that we consider important for an efficient Human-Robot Cooperation. Furthermore, we present a tentative architecture of an adjustable control system, where these aspects are emphasized.

International audience; In Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) scenarios, an intelligent robot should be able to synthesize an appropriate behavior adapted to human profile (i.e., personality). Recent research studies discussed the effect of personality traits on human verbal and nonverbal behaviors. The dynamic characteristics of the generated gestures and postures during the nonverbal communication can differ according to personality traits, which similarly can influence the verbal content of human speech. This research tries to map human verbal behavior to a corresponding verbal and nonverbal combined robot behavior based on the extraversion-introversion personality dimension. We explore the human-robot personality matching aspect and the similarity attraction principle, in addition to the different effects of the adapted combined robot behavior expressed through speech and gestures, and the adapted speech-only robot behavior, on interaction. Experiments with the humanoid NAO robot are reported.