HRI Lab @ UNICA

HRI Lab is a laboratory of Human-Robot Interaction at the University of Cagliari and in collaboration with R2M Solution s.r.l. whose research and development activities are dedicated to the understanding, designing, and evaluating of several robotic platforms which employ different research technologies (e.g. Sentiment Analysis, Semantic Web, Deep Learning, Big Data, Sensors, Computer Vision, Natural Language Processing) when interacting with humans

NAO/Zora photo

Research

This laboratory works on a mixture of technologies related to the Deep Learning, Sentiment Analysis, IoT, Assistive Technologies and Semantic Web domains, that we have leveraged for Human-Robot-Interaction. Several use cases and projects have already been developed on top of NAO/Zora, a completely programmable and autonomous humanoid robot, and they aim at allowing NAO/Zora to interact with humans using natural language for different tasks. Example use cases allow the robot:

  1. talking to the user and understanding his/her sentiments by using a dedicated Semantic Sentiment Analysis engine;
  2. generating answers to open-dialog natural language utterances through a Generative Conversational Agent;
  3. performing action commands depending on open-dialog natural language utterances and a Robot Action ontology;
  4. identifying which objects the user is showing to the robot cameras by using convolutional neural networks trained on a huge collection of annotated objects;
  5. integrating Google Assistant technologies within NAO/Zora to experience a much more natural interaction with the robot;
  6. playing with NAO/Zora;
  7. using NAO/Zora to control smart objects. The source code of each use case is publicly available in repositories and dedicated videos show how they work.
Many more coming soon....

Projects

Team

News

Selected publications related to HRI

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Resources

Videos

In collaboration with