Giulio Sandini

• Research Director at Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia

Designing a social humanoid robot to enhance human cognitive multitasking in a mixed human-robot team is anything but straightforward. In fact, the robot’s presence and behavior can either improve or impair human performance. In this study, we examined how different vitality forms—expressed through the robot’s actions, speech and facial expressions...

Central vision loss due to binocular maculopathy significantly impairs daily tasks like reading by disrupting oculomotor behavior, particularly saccadic movements. This study employed the REALTER system, an extended reality simulator, to replicate severe binocular maculopathy in eighteen healthy participants. Using the MNREAD Acuity Chart, we measu...

The robots that entered the manufacturing sector in the second and third Industrial Revolutions (IR2 and IR3) were designed for carrying out predefined routines without physical interaction with humans. In contrast, IR4* robots (i.e., robots since IR4 and beyond) are supposed to interact with humans in a cooperative way for enhancing flexibility, a...

Immersive technology, such as extended reality, holds promise as a tool for educating ophthalmologists about the effects of low vision and for enhancing visual rehabilitation protocols. However, immersive simulators have not been evaluated for their ability to induce changes in the oculomotor system, which is crucial for understanding the visual ex...

The trend in industrial/service robotics is to develop robots that can cooperate with people, interacting with them in an autonomous, safe and purposive way. These are the fundamental elements characterizing the fourth and the fifth industrial revolutions (4IR, 5IR): the crucial innovation is the adoption of intelligent technologies that can allow...

In this editorial dedicated to the special issue which celebrates the 20th anniversary of the International Journal of Humanoid Robotics (IJHR), we outline the history of IJHR.

During social interactions, actions can be performed with different forms as a function of the mood driving them. These action forms i.e. vitality forms (VFs), have a strong influence in human interactions allowing people to immediately understand the attitude of others. Moreover, it has been demonstrated that the gentle and rude VFs expressed by a...

Frequently in rehabilitation, visually impaired persons are passive agents of exercises with fixed environmental constraints. In fact, a printed tactile map, i.e. a particular picture with a specific spatial arrangement, can usually not be edited. Interaction with map content, instead, facilitates the learning of spatial skills because it exploits...

While navigating through the surroundings, we constantly rely on inertial vestibular signals for self-motion along with visual and acoustic spatial references from the environment. However, the interaction between inertial cues and environmental spatial references is not yet fully understood. Here we investigated whether vestibular self-motion sens...

A humanoid robot is a particular form of embodied agent. The form that an agent takes has a major impact on how that agent interacts with its environment and how it develops an understanding of that environment through its interactions. In this paper, we explore the importance of humanoid embodiment and we argue that humanoids occupy a special nich...

This paper investigates the role that kinematic features play in human action similarity judgments. The results of three experiments with human participants are compared with the computational model that solves the same task. The chosen model has its roots in developmental robotics and performs action classification based on learned kinematic primi...

Ocular dominance is a basic visual property that shows short-term plasticity in adult humans, where 2h of monocular deprivation leads to a homeostatic shift of ocular dominance in favour of the deprived eye. Using an altered reality setting, we found that this homeostatic plasticity can be triggered without depriving one eye of visual input, but me...

Background Learning of a visuomotor task not only leads to changes in motor performance but also improves proprioceptive function of the trained joint/limb system. Such sensorimotor learning may show intra-joint transfer that is observable at a previously untrained degrees of freedom of the trained joint. Objective Here, we examined if and to what...

Interactions entail a tangled mix of emotional states that emerge between the people who are communicating. Being capable of comprehending these states help us to adapt to our partner's needs enhancing the interaction. In the same fashion, we believe that robots capable of such skills would be better integrated in society. Hence, this paper tackles...

Determining the spatial relation between objects and our location in the surroundings is essential for survival. Vestibular inputs provide key information about the position and movement of our head in the three-dimensional space, contributing to spatial navigation. Yet, their role in encoding spatial localisation of environmental targets remains t...

The project REALTER (wearable egocentric altered reality simulator) exploits immersive technologies and extended reality (XR) environments to support low-vision rehabilitation, by offering an immersive simulator of low-vision conditions. Perceiving and navigating the world as low-vision individuals has the potential of being a useful tool for ophth...

There is an increasing demand for robots capable of safely interacting with individuals in everyday scenarios. This necessitates their ability to comprehend human behavior, predict future actions, and respond accordingly. This is precisely the focus of the field known as cognitive robotics . Cognitive robots can learn from experience and others,...

Although deep learning models are state-of-the-art models in audio classification, they fall short when applied in developmental robotic settings and human–robot interaction (HRI). The major drawback is that deep learning relies on supervised training with a large amount of data and annotations. In contrast, developmental learning strategies in hum...

Designing a humanoid robot to assist in performing cognitive multitasking is not straightforward, as the robot’s communication itself could interfere with humans’ concentration on the tasks. Therefore, we focused on the social facilitation effect caused by the presence of social robots. According to our study, a social robot that expressed its will...

Vestibular cues are crucial to sense the linear and angular acceleration of our head in three-dimensional space. Previous literature showed that vestibular information precociously combines with other sensory modalities, such as proprioceptive and visual, to facilitate spatial navigation. Recent studies suggest that auditory cues may improve self-m...

Background Learning of a visuomotor task not only leads to changes in motor performance but also improves proprioceptive function of the trained joint/limb system. Such sensorimotor learning may show intra-joint transfer that is observable at a previously untrained degrees of freedom of the trained joint. In addition, it may transfer to the homolog...

The purpose of this research is to contribute to social communication between humans and robots in scenes that have been considered difficult due to the limited facial expression capabilities of robots. In order to provide more detailed facial expressions, we designed a novel wire-driven 3D eyebrow using a soft material with a bending structure. We...

A key goal in human-robot interaction (HRI) is to design scenarios between humanoid robots and humans such that the interaction is perceived as collaborative and natural, yet safe and comfortable for the human. Human skills like verbal and non-verbal communication are essential elements as humans tend to attribute social behaviors to robots. Howeve...

This special issue includes state-of-the-art research on emerging topics on development and learning in natural and artificial systems. In addition to new submissions, the special issue includes extensions of the paper awarded the Best Paper Award at ICDL-EpiRob 2020—the 10th Joint IEEE Conference on Development and Learning and Epigenetic Roboti...

The current state of the art in cognitive robotics, covering the challenges of building AI-powered intelligent robots inspired by natural cognitive systems. A novel approach to building AI-powered intelligent robots takes inspiration from the way natural cognitive systems—in humans, animals, and biological systems—develop intelligence by exploiting...

In daily life situations touch and movement cannot be disentangled. Furthermore, the relation between object manipulation as well as performance in haptic tasks and spatial ability is still little understood. In this study, we used iCube, a sensorized cube recording its orientation in space as well as the location of the points of contact on its fa...

Social engineering is rising more and more concerns due to its ability to bypass traditional cyber security defense systems. In the last four years, we studied how to develop an intelligent system able to prevent humans' compliance with social engineering threats, based on the real-time assessment of humans' physiological reactions. Moreover, we ex...

When moving through space, we encode multiple sensory cues that guide our orientation through the environment. The integration between visual and self-motion cues is known to improve navigation. However, spatial navigation may also benefit from multisensory external signals. The present study aimed to investigate whether humans combine auditory and...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frobt.2020.00121.].

Working memory is a cognitive system devoted to storage and retrieval processing of information. Numerous studies on the development of working memory have investigated the processing of visuo-spatial and verbal non-spatialized information; however, little is known regarding the refinement of acoustic spatial and memory abilities across development...

Robots destined to tasks like teaching or caregiving have to build a long-lasting social rapport with their human partners. This requires, from the robot side, to be capable of assessing whether the partner is trustworthy. To this aim a robot should be able to assess whether someone is lying or not, while preserving the pleasantness of the social i...

To orient and move efficiently in the environment, we need to rely on multiple external and internal cues. Previous studies reported the combined use of spatialized auditory cues and self-motion information in spatial navigation and orientation. In this study, we investigated the feasibility of a setup composed of a motion platform and an acoustic...

Background In this work, we present a novel sensory substitution system that enables to learn three dimensional digital information via touch when vision is unavailable. The system is based on a mouse-shaped device, designed to jointly perceive, with one finger only, local tactile height and inclination cues of arbitrary scalar fields. The device h...

Background: In recent years, many studies focused on the use of robotic devices for both the assessment and the neuro-motor reeducation of upper limb in subjects after stroke, spinal cord injuries or affected by neurological disorders. Contrarily, it is still hard to find examples of robot-aided assessment and rehabilitation after traumatic injuri...

Several studies have shown that impairments in a sensory modality can induce perceptual deficits in tasks involving the remaining senses. For example, people with retinal degenerative diseases like Macular Degeneration (MD) and with central scotoma show biased auditory localization abilities towards the visual field's scotoma area. This result indi...

Trust is essential in human-robot interactions, and in times where machines are yet to be fully reliable, it is important to study how robotic hardware faults can affect the human counterpart. This experiment builds on a previous research that studied trust changes in a game-like scenario with the humanoid robot iCub. Several robot hardware failure...

The investigation of emerging adults' expectations of development of the next generation of robots is a fundamental challenge to narrow the gap between expectations and real technological advances, which can potentially impact the effectiveness of future interactions between humans and robots. Furthermore, the literature highlights the important ro...

In this chapter we describe the history and evolution of the iCub humanoid platform. We start by describing the first version as it was designed during the RobotCub EU project and illustrate how it evolved to become the platform that is adopted by more than 30 laboratories world wide. We complete the chapter by illustrating some of the research act...

In the past years, the field of collaborative robots has been developing fast, with applications ranging from health care to search and rescue, construction, entertainment, sports, and many others. However, current social robotics is still far from the general abilities we expect in a robot collaborator. This limitation is more evident when robots...

The ability to recognize human partners is an important social skill to build personalized and long-term human-robot interactions, especially in scenarios like education, care-giving, and rehabilitation. Faces and voices constitute two important sources of information to enable artificial systems to reliably recognize individuals. Deep learning net...

Games are often used to foster human partners’ engagement and natural behavior, even when they are played with or against robots. Therefore, beyond their entertainment value, games represent ideal interaction paradigms where to investigate natural human-robot interaction and to foster robots’ diffusion in the society. However, most of the state-of-...

Proprioceptive training is a neurorehabilitation approach known to improve proprioceptive acuity and motor performance of a joint/limb system. Here, we examined if such learning transfers to the contralateral joints. Using a robotic exoskeleton, 15 healthy, right-handed adults (18–35 years) trained a visuomotor task that required making increasingl...

This collection of works is a contribution to the current debates on the mind-body-problem. It discusses how mind and body make contact in sense-making processes from the point of view of enactive cognitive science and 4E approaches to cognition. It also offers a critical view on non-representational approaches to cognition. The book covers sociolo...

Recognizing objects through touch is a complex task based on integrating information coming from multiple senses and motor commands guiding the exploratory motions. To gain insight into the development of exploratory strategies in children, in this study we addressed the question: how does exploration change when the stimulus becomes freely movable...

Understanding which features humans rely on - in visually recognizing action similarity is a crucial step towards a clearer picture of human action perception from a learning and developmental perspective. In the present work, we investigate to which extent a computational model based on kinematics can determine action similarity and how its perfor...

Cover Page, Preface, Invited Speakers, Organizing Committee, Venue, Sponsors, Organizers, and Awards.

In our everyday lives we regularly engage in complex, personalized, and adaptive interactions with our peers. To recreate the same kind of rich, human-like interactions, a social robot should be aware of our needs and affective states and continuously adapt its behavior to them. Our proposed solution is to have the robot learn how to select the beh...

Abstract During interpersonal interactions, people perform actions with different forms of vitality, communicating their positive or negative attitude toward others. For example, a handshake can be “soft” or “vigorous”, a caress can be ‘kind’ or ‘rushed’. While previous studies have shown that the dorso-central insula is a key area for the processi...

Understanding which features humans rely on -- in visually recognizing action similarity is a crucial step towards a clearer picture of human action perception from a learning and developmental perspective. In the present work, we investigate to which extent a computational model based on kinematics can determine action similarity and how its perfo...

Robotic failures are an inevitable occurrence. This study tries to shed light on how people perceived failures and how much they affect the interaction. Continuing the work on a previous reliable study, this research gathers information on how people perceive a failure in an online validation study. After the failures have been selected, they were...

In collaborative tasks, human partners and robots need to coordinate in shared environment. One of the fundamental prerequisites for effective collaborations is sharing an attentional focus on the same perceptual events. Joint attention has been widely studied through the investigation of its psychological, cognitive and social defining elements. A...

Vestibular perception is useful to maintain heading direction and successful spatial navigation. In this study, we present a novel equipment capable of delivering both rotational and translational movements, namely the RT-Chair. The system comprises two motors and it is controlled by the user via MATLAB. To validate the measurability of vestibular...

In our everyday lives we are accustomed to partake in complex, personalized, adaptive interactions with our peers. For a social robot to be able to recreate this same kind of rich, human-like interaction, it should be aware of our needs and affective states and be capable of continuously adapting its behavior to them. One proposed solution to this...

Detecting lies in a real-world scenario is an important skill for a humanoid robot that aims to act as a teacher, a therapist, or a caregiver. In these contexts, it is essential to detect lies while preserving the pleasantness of the social interaction and the informality of the relation. This study investigates whether pupil dilation related to an...

For most people magicians seem to surpass human abilities, combining skills and deception to perform mesmerizing tricks. Robots performing magic tricks could similarly fascinate and engage the audience, potentially establishing a novel rapport with human partners. However, magician robots are usually done by Wizard of Oz. This study presents an aut...

Humans are excellent at perceiving different features of the actions performed by others. For instance, by viewing someone else manipulating an unknown object, one can infer its weight–an intrinsic feature otherwise not directly accessible through vision. How such perceptual skill develops during childhood remains unclear. To confront this gap, the...

In social interactions, human movement is a rich source of information for all those who take part in the collaboration. In fact, a variety of intuitive messages are communicated through motion and continuously inform the partners about the future unfolding of the actions. A similar exchange of implicit information could support movement coordinati...

Blindness is an ideal condition to study the role of visual input on the development of spatial representation. Studies have shown how audio space representation reorganizes in blindness. However, how spatial reorganization works is still unclear. A limit of the study on blindness is that it is a “stable” system and it does not allow studying the m...

Deception is a complex social skill present in human interactions. Many social professions such as teachers, therapists and law enforcement officers leverage on deception detection techniques to support their work activities. Robots with the ability to autonomously detect deception could provide an important aid to human-human and human-robot inter...

The aim of this work is to present a novel robot-based method to assess the sources of a lack of functionality in patients with recent traumatic wrist injuries. Post-traumatic patients experience limited range of motion as well as strength and proprioceptive deficits. These dysfunctions are related to different complications that usually follow the...

When faced with a novel object, we explore it to understand its shape. This way we combine information coming from different senses, as touch, proprioception and vision, together with the motor information embedded in our motor execution plan. The exploration process provides a structure and constrains this rich flow of inputs, supporting the forma...

It has been previously shown that the interaction between vision and audition involves early sensory cortices. However, the functional role of these interactions and their modulation due to sensory impairment is not yet understood. To shed light on the impact of vision on auditory spatial processing, we recorded ERPs and collected psychophysical re...

In this work we describe a novel method to enable robots to adapt their action timing to the concurrent actions of a human partner in a repetitive joint task. We propose to exploit purely motion-based information to detect view-invariant dynamic instants of observed actions, i.e. moments in which the action dynamic is subject to a severe change. We...

The style of an action, i.e. the way it is performed, has a strong influence on interaction between humans. The same gesture has different consequences when it is performed aggressively or kindly, and humans are very sensitive to these subtle differences in others' behaviors. In this work we investigated how to endow a humanoid robot with behaviors...

Lie detection is a necessary skill for a variety of social professions, including teachers, reporters, therapists, and law enforcement officers. Autonomous system and robots should acquire such skill to support professionals in numerous working contexts. Inspired by literature on human-human interaction, this work investigates whether the behaviora...

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was des...

The next generation of robot companions or robot working partners will need to satisfy social requirements somehow similar to the famous laws of robotics envisaged by Isaac Asimov time ago (Asimov, 1942). The necessary technology has almost reached the required level, including sensors and actuators, but the cognitive organization is still in its i...

In conjunction with what is often called the industry 4.0, the new machine age, or the rise of the robots, the authors of this paper have each experienced the following phenomenon. At public events and roundtable discussions, among our circles of friends, or during interviews with the media, we are asked on a surprisingly regular basis: "How must h...