Modeling Human Cognition for Social Robotics Applications: Latest Advances and Prospects
A special issue of Applied Sciences (ISSN 2076-3417). This special issue belongs to the section "Robotics and Automation".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 May 2023) | Viewed by 2255
Special Issue Editors
Interests: social robotics; cognitive systems; human–robot interaction; artificial emotions; artificial consciousness; humanoid expressive robots
Interests: mutual behaviour adaptation in human–robot interactions; contextual reasoning; development of cognitive systems for autonomous robots; social robotics
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
The creation of a social robot is the perfect example of interdisciplinarity, merging knowledge coming from automation, computer science, mechatronics, and machine learning with fields outside of the engineering realm, such as neuroscience, social psychology, and philosophy, to cite a few. This synergy has resulted in human-inspired cognitive, perception, and actuation systems designed to turn a robot into a social agent with interaction capabilities. In particular, thanks to the capability to interpret and express emotions, social robots have been successful in education and the treatment of individuals with neurodevelopmental or behavioural disorders and as support for neurodegenerative diseases. Nonetheless, the impact is wider, and the aim is twofold: on one hand, as social roboticists, we are interested in increasing autonomy, embodying human-like reasoning, behaviour, and movements in a robot, which implies having a counterpart that better satisfies our expectations and thus can socially resonate with us; on the other hand, in this process, we are creating a human replica, i.e., a platform on which we can implement and test theories of human cognition and behaviour with a systematic approach. Today, indeed, many studies involve social robots to investigate how humans make decisions, what they feel during a social interaction, and when they trust others. However, we are seeing much less work that demonstrates the actual application of these robots in the wild, outside the laboratory environment.
This Special Issue aims at encouraging leading scientists to contribute with their latest advances and prospects in the design, building, testing, and application of social robots, with a particular focus on robot autonomy, including cognition, personality, and behaviour design, representation of emotions and their influence on robot decision making, and applications in real-world settings, but with no limitations to novel solutions that could help to improve the naturalness and effectiveness of human–robot social interaction.
Dr. Lorenzo Cominelli
Dr. Abolfazl Zaraki
Guest Editors
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Keywords
- modelling social cognition in HRI
- social robot autonomy
- human-inspired cognitive architectures for social robotics
- live mutual learning and behaviour adaptation
- robot empathy
- long-term interaction
- human-likeness in morphology and actuation
- robot personality and behavioural models
- social robots applications in real-world settings
- social robots acceptance and likeability
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