HRI Lab @ UNICA

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.