Social Robotics Laboratory
Patrice Caire launched the Social Robotics lab in 2012, at the University of Luxembourg-SnT, as an interdisciplinary research group, to study the fields of social robotics, human-robot interaction, cognitive and developmental robotics and Embodied Artificial Intelligence. Patrice Caire directed the lab until 2018, launching a number of key projects, such as the Luxembourg United robot soccer team, CoRobots and COPAINS. In total, the Lab aquired 13 Nao robots and one Pepper robot. The research group working with Dr Caire consisted of seven students pursuing their studies from BAs to PhDs.
Human-Robot Interaction
Today, voice-user interfaces like Alexa or Siri are part of our environments. We attribute personality traits to these virtual agents and engage with them. Does your robot understand what you say? How should your robot talk to you? We look at these issues particularly in different settings: healthcare, museum, and smart houses.
Keywords: Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing and Generating; Multi-Modal Perception; Gesture and Facial Expressions
Distributed Artificial Intelligence
The Internet of Things (IoT)—also called ambient intelligence—allows the connection between all our surrounding objects. This interconnected world is called a smart home, when it is a house, and a smart city or digital city, when it scales up to the size of a town or more. When all these objects “talk” to each other. What happens to us?
Keywords: Normative Multiagent systems, Muti-Context systems; Distributed Reasoning; Reasoning under Uncertainty; Ethical AI
Cooperation and Coalition Formation
Imagine human-robot cooperation in the age of social media and AI. And what about robot to robot cooperation? Indeed, we want our robots to successfully work with each other: our robot assistant should be able to connect to the smart coffee machine, and take the package delivered by the drone. To study these cooperations, we have robots play team sport, like soccer.
Keywords: Graph Theory; Dependence Networks; Cooperation; Coalition Formation; Multi-Robot Coordination
Publications; Press coverage; Speeches
View videos:
Tough match against the UNSW Australian team
Requirements Engineering
When interacting with humans, conviviality and friendliness are paramount. So is our privacy: We need to know that our data is safe. Seniors will have an increasingly active role while interacting with social robots. The next generation of home mobile service robots will do more tasks — and we want them to be social and secure.
Keywords: Visual languages; Empirical research; Modelling analysis; End-user communication; Requirements analysis