Marking the 7th year since Prof. Dautenhahn joined Canada 150 Research Chairs, her work is highlighted in an interview.
Mirrly is a new humanoid robot designed to facilitate human-robot social interactions, focusing on applications in therapy and education for children. Inspired by the need for engaging and effective interactions, Mirrly’s design incorporates a friendly appearance, articulated expressive face, and multimodal interaction capabilities.
An interdisciplinary research team from the University of Waterloo's Social and Intelligent Robotics Research Lab (SIRRL) has found that people prefer interacting with robots they perceive to have social identities like their own.
This finding was made by a pair of Waterloo professors: Dr. Moojan Ghafurian, based in the Department of Systems Design Engineering and Dr. Kerstin Dautenhahn, from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who worked together to conduct new research on human interactions with social robots. These robots possess social abilities and can interact with humans in interpersonal and social manners.