Entertainment robot gets H2020 backing

Academics at the UK’s Heriot-Watt University that will help to develop a humanoid robot have secured €900,000 of funding from Horizon 2020 over four years.

Professor Oliver Lemon and his team in the Interaction Lab in Edinburgh will assist in the development of the MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot that will be able to engage and interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environment of a shopping centre, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the public. The robot will follow-on from the work the team previously carried out on socially intelligent robot communication in the FP7 ‘Joint Action for Multimodal Embodied Social Systems’, or JAMES, project.

Using co-design methods, the team will work with stakeholders including customers, retailers and business managers, to develop truly engaging robot behaviours, including telling jokes or playing games, as well as providing guidance, information, and collecting customer feedback.

Commenting, Lemon says: “Crucially, our robot will exhibit behaviour that is socially appropriate, combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation.”

To support suitable behaviour, the scientists will develop and integrate new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. During the project, the robot will be deployed in a large public shopping centre in Finland.

The project is led by the University of Glasgow and includes the participation of IDIAP, Aldebaran Robotics and CNRS.