- Research
- 28/06/2019
New TU/e lab makes robots more social
With a Social Robotics Lab TU/e hopes to ensure that robots and humans will understand each other better. In the lab, which was set up by the Center for Humans & Technology, students and researchers can design robots that are not only clever, but social as well. “Making robots social is done by means of human subjects.” Today the new lab will be opened officially during a symposium in Atlas.
TU/e has already sprouted world-famous robots, but it is only today that it is getting a Social Robotics Lab. “The earlier robot research at TU/e was rather fragmented”, says Raymond Cuijpers. “True, even in 2014 at Mechanical Engineering the robot research was bundled in the High Tech Systems Center (HTSC), but I see that as just one side of the medal.” That is why, together with co-founder Emilia Barakova, Cuijpers is now offering a research lab for the other side, for research into the interaction between humans and robots.
We cannot escape the fact; in the future it will be more and more important for robots to be able to work with each other and with people. Robots need to become more social and that is going to take a great deal of research yet. “What is new is that we now have a highly accessible lab TU/e-wide, which provides facilities to researchers within and outside the university, in fact to all of Europe”, says Cuijpers. “We run and manage the lab ourselves, but for the outside world we want to become the face for social robots. And that begins with a good place.”
Atlas
That good place is located on the sixth and ninth floors of Atlas. Two Nao’s (autonomous, programmable humanoid robots) and Pepper (a semi-humanoid robot with the capacity to read emotions) can be used here for individual research. In fact this has already been conducted since the end of January of this year.
An office space was equipped with furniture so as to be able to conduct research in a domestic environment, in the corridor are chairs in a waiting room arrangement. “At this moment we are looking into the socially desirable distance between humans and robot. Making robots social is done by means of human subjects, and we have a database for this at the Center for Humans & Technology.”
Apart from individual research into artificial social intelligence, education is provided as well in the Social Robotics Lab. “Next week the subject of Human Robot Interaction, an elective course at the master of Human Technology Interaction, will be rounded off with an examination. The students have been involved for eight weeks in making a robot work together with humans. What you see on TV is not reality by a long chalk yet. You see a robot take hold of the hand of a human, but that is not an easy feat by any means. Students learn the basics; navigate towards a human, how to begin a conversation and how a robot can react to human emotions. We do so with topical themes. They need to keep in mind a museum guide or a receptionist or an assistant in a waiting room.”
Symposium June 28
The opening this afternoon will be celebrated with the symposium The Future of Social Robotics. Guest speakers, including Maarten Steinbuch (TU/e), Tony Belpaeme (Ghent University) and Jim Tørresen (University of Oslo) will discuss the latest developments in the area of social robotics. The symposium is accessible to all.
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