UNIVERSITY OF HERTFORDSHIRE
             COMPUTER SCIENCE RESEARCH COLLOQUIUM

                            presents

                          "TheatreBot"

                 Julian Mauricio Angel Fernandez
                  (Politecnico di Milano, Italy)

                     18 March 2015 (Wednesday)
                          1 pm -2 pm

                  Hatfield, College Lane Campus
                       Seminar Room D102

                  Everyone is Welcome to Attend

                  Refreshments will be available





Abstract:

Human social interactions are based on the correct response to social
situations. If someone does not respond in an expected way, he/she is
marginalized by the others. Thus, robots that interact with humans in
everyday life places, such as home, office, classroom and public spaces,
should not only accomplish their task, but also be accepted by humans,
which means that they feel comfortable to interact with robots. As a
consequence, social robots must have the capacity to show emotions and
behave in a socially correct way. However, building robots that could
accomplish their tasks and show emotion is not an easy job due to the
difficulty to select the correct emotion, show the emotion in a way that
could be understandable by humans, together with all the traditional
problems to perform a given task. This makes crucial it to find a real
environment that allows focusing the research efforts on the production
of effective social and emotional interaction, without the need for other
abilities (e.g., emotion detection, status detection, person recognition,
etc.). Several researches have suggested that theatre could be an
excellent place to test social and emotional abilities, due to theatre
constraints that make the actor know what to say, how to react, where is
expected to be the objects and other actors. All of this information is
given before hand in a script. However, the few works that have been about
robots on stage in the last decade have used theatre as an environment
to create robots for entertainment, without worrying about the use of
theatre actor training theories to make the robot project emotions to
the audience. TheatreBot aims at exploiting theatre constraints to build
a robotic platform and software that allow the robot to be an actor in
theatre and not just as prop, as currently is happening. The system and
platform will be designed to allow extension to other application areas
where showing emotions are important as in robot games and assistive
robots. To accomplish this goal, the robot will use a relational social
and social model of the world to represent its character's feelings and
belief about the world. Besides, the concept of emotional state is used
to add emotional features to action performance, so obtaining a full
range of possibilities to show emotional and social interaction.


---------------------------------------------------
Hertfordshire Computer Science Research Colloquium
http://cs-colloq.stca.herts.ac.uk