Research Themes

basketball-playing robot called MyJay is part of a vision for a future in which social robots are accessible to children in public schools and libraries.

The research themes below are highly interdisciplinary and involve many collaborators.

  1. Cognitive robotics and architectures for autonomous robots: The goal here is to facilitate human-robot co-learning and adaptation, taking into consideration e.g. interaction histories and autobiographic memory. These topics are studied in the general context of improving human-robot interaction as well as in targeted applications concerning smart home environments that include cognitive robot companions. An additional line of investigation concerns mechanisms of social learning in human-robot teaching as well as developing robots that use continual learning to adapt to new tasks and contexts.

  2. Measuring and improving the quality of interaction and engagement in human-robot interactions. This includes research on using physiological sensors to enable adaptive human-robot interaction, e.g in the context of robot norm violations. Another line of investigation concerns the study and use of gaze behaviour in human-robot interaction. In addition, we are developing multi-modal interaction for human-robot interaction, including affective computing, to enhance human-robot interaction.

  3. Robot-assisted therapy and education for children. Several projects in SIRRL are developing robots for children with neurodevelopmental and other challenges. We also explore the use of social robots to assist children who stutter, or others with different speech and language challenges, as well as  how to assist therapists. In the context of typically developing children, we explore using robots as social actors to teach children about bullying in order to support the development of coping strategies.

  4. Culturally adaptive robots. We investigate how robots can adapt to users' cultural backgrounds and preferences. This includes user-driven customization as well as mechanisms for system-driven personalization.

  5. Social robots to help refugee children and families. This theme investigates how social robots can help refugee families.

  6. Social and intelligent robot home companions.  This theme includes research into assistive robots to improve care for older adults in home or care settings, including people with dementia, as well as general home assistance for everyone.

  7. Studying the use of social robots to address mental wellbeing, e.g. to support people with social anxiety, or the use of social robots as a tool in the hands of clinicians in other clinical applications.

  8. Biologically Inspired Robotics: Intelligent Systems for Trustworthy Human-Robot Co-learning and Adaptation. This includes the study of developing trustworthy human-robot interaction in cobot scenarios (robots as coworkers). In addition we study social learning and imitation in human-robot interaction, in particular regarding the role of a robot’s non-verbal cues and how it has an impact on human’s perception of the robot

Previous projects recently completed:

  1. Safety Enables Cooperation in Uncertain Robotic Environments (Horizon2020 SECURE) project, coordinated by Prof. Stefan Wermter at University of Hamburg, Germany.
  2. Bringing together psychological (top-down) and biological (bottom-up) processes for enhancing human-robot interaction (HRI-BioPsy, funded by AFOSR). 
  3. Horizon 2020 Babyrobot project: (Child-Robot Communication and Collaboration: Edutainment, Behavioural Modelling and Cognitive Development in Typically Developing and Autistic Spectrum Children, coordinated by Prof. Costas Tzafestas and Prof. Alexandros Potamianos (Institute of Communication and Computer Systems, Athens, Greece). Professor Dautenhahn was PI for the University of Hertfordshire team.
  4. Trustworthy Robotic Assistants (2013-2016), funded by The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC, UK). Professor Dautenhahn was the PI for the University of Hertfordshire team. The project was coordinated by Professor Michael Fisher (Liverpool, UK).