About

Objectives

Building robots capable of behaving in a human-like manner is a long-term goal in robotics. It is becoming even more crucial with the growing number of applications in which robots are brought closer to humans, not only trained experts, but also inexperienced users, children, the elderly, or clinical populations.


Current research from different disciplines contributes to this general endeavor in various ways:

  • by creating robots that mimic specific aspects of human behavior,

  • by designing brain-inspired cognitive architectures for robots,

  • by implementing embodied neural models driving robots’ behavior,

  • by reproducing human motion dynamics on robots,

  • by investigating how humans perceive and interact with robots, dependent on the degree of the robots’ human-likeness.


This workshop aims to bring together scholars from the areas of research that are involved in such endeavor (e.g., robotics, artificial intelligence, human-robot interaction, computational modeling of human cognition and behavior, psychology, cognitive neuroscience). It is conceived as a forum to encourage discussions about recent advances and future challenges related to the following questions:

  • How to design robots with human-like behavior and cognition?

  • What are the best methods for examining human-like behavior and cognition?

  • What are the best approaches for implementing human-like behavior and cognition in robots?

  • How to manipulate, control and measure robots‘ degree of human-likeness?

  • Is autonomy a prerequisite for human-likeness?

  • How to best measure human reception of human-likeness of robots?

  • What is the link between perceived human-likeness and social attunement in human-robot interaction?

  • How can such human-like robots inform and enable human-centered research?

  • How can modeling human-like behavior in robots inform us about human cognition?

  • In what contexts and applications do we need human-like behavior or cognition? And in what contexts it is not necessary?


Topics of interest

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

  • Characteristics of human-like behavior and cognition

  • Brain-inspired cognitive architectures

  • Embodied neural models

  • Measures of human-likeness

  • Human motion dynamics

  • Bio-inspired robot control

  • Human-robot interaction

  • Acceptability of robotic systems

  • Perception of human-likeness in artificial agents

  • Means to measure perceived human-likeness

  • Social attunement with human-like robots

  • Understanding human cognition


Organizers

  • Marwen Belkaid, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy)

  • Giorgio Metta, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy)

  • Tony Prescott, University of Sheffield (United Kingdom)

  • Agnieszka Wykowska, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (Italy)