About the speaker
Giorgio Metta is the Scientific Director of the Italian Institute of Technology (https://www.iit.it/scientific-director). He holds an MSc with honors (1994) and a PhD (2000) in electrical engineering from the University of Genoa. From 2001 to 2002, he was a postdoctoral associate at the AI-Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He worked at the University of Genoa and was Professor of Cognitive Robotics at the University of Plymouth (UK) from 2012 to 2019. From 2020 to 2021 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Manchester, UK. Giorgio Metta served as deputy scientific director of IIT from 2016 to 2019. He serves in the Board of Directors of Gefran S.p.A. and Industrie De Nora S.p.A., two listed Italian companies. Giorgio Metta’s research activities are in the field of bioinspired systems and humanoid robotics, with a focus on the design of machines that can learn from experience; he has authored or co-authored more than 300 scientific publications and worked as PI in a variety of international and industrial research projects. He has coordinated the development of the iCub robot for more than a decade, making it the de facto platform of choice for research in AI; there are currently more than 50 robots in the world, in research labs as far as Japan, China, Singapore, Germany, Spain, the UK and the US.
Abstract
Human-robot collaboration is a challenging task that requires developing artificial perceptual skills to interpret human behaviors and exquisite timing to react seamlessly to such behaviors. One of the main goals of human-robot collaboration is to achieve a shared understanding of the task and the environment, as well as a mutual adaptation of behaviors and goals. In this talk, I will present two aspects of human-robot collaboration that can be generically understood as the “social” and the “physical” domain of interaction. All experiments are carried out on the iCub humanoid robot, a platform that offers rich perceptual and motor capabilities. In the social domain, I describe experiments that aim to understand how humans interactants interpret the behavior of the iCub in well-defined and controllable scenarios. On the other hand, in the physical domain, we develop direct sensing of human movements to integrate them in the iCub controllers.