If robotic companions are to be used in the near future by aging adults, they have to be accepted by them. In the process of developing a methodology to measure, predict and explain acceptance of robotic companions, we researched the…

Nowadays robots are being created that interact with human beings in order to satisfy certain social needs. Following this trend, the development of the social robot Probo has started. The robot will be used in hospitals, as a tele-interface for…

GlowBots are small tangible, communicating and interactive robots that show eye-catching visual patterns on a round LED display. This paper details the development of the GlowBots from the early user-oriented design phase, through hardware and software development and onto preliminary…

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is one of the most important subfields of social robotics. In several applications, text-to-speech (TTS) techniques are used by robots to provide feedback to humans. In this respect, a natural synchronization between the synthetic voice and the…

This paper presents a new system for recognition and imitation of a set of facial expressions using the visual information acquired by the robot. Besides, the proposed system detects and imitates the interlocutor’s head pose and motion. The approach described…