Social Robotics
The Robotics Group at Lincoln specialises in enabling technologies for mobile and interactive robots that live together with people in natural indoor and outdoor environments. Our research in social robotics, in partnership with the Lincoln Social Computing Research Centre, includes work on human-robot interaction (HRI), recognition and tracking of people, and exploring the links between animal and robot behaviour.
Our research on detection and tracking of people involves
sensor fusion from a variety of modalities, including thermal
imaging, laser range-finders and colour vision.
Further work on cognitive robot perception includes high-level
inference of human activity, while using the results of this
inference to influence decisions about sensing in dynamic
environments. Other research includes cognitive and
developmental robotics in the context of HRI, allowing for
better understanding in the communication between man and
machine. Current research investigates emotional mechanisms
present in humans that can be adapted to robots.
Investigators
- Grzegorz Cielniak
- Nicola Bellotto
- John Murray
- Tom Duckett
External Cooperation
Representative Publications
Nicola Bellotto and Huosheng Hu, Multisensor-Based Human Detection and Tracking for Mobile Service Robots, IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Part B, Vol. 39, No. 1, pp. 167-181, 2009.
John Murray and Lola Cañamero, Towards a Model of Emotion Expression in an Interactive Robot Head, Proc. 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, Toyama International Conference Center, Japan, Sept. 27 - Oct. 2, 2009.
Lori Malatesta, John Murray, Amaryllis Raouzaiou, Antoine Hiolle, Lola Cañamero and Kostas Karpouzis, Emotion modelling and facial affect recognition in human-computer and human-robot interaction, Affective Computing, Emotion Modelling, Synthesis and Recognition, V. Kordic (ed.), ARS Publishers, 2008.
Nicola Bellotto and Huosheng Hu, Multisensor Data Fusion for Joint People Tracking and Identification with a Service Robot, Proc. of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics (ROBIO), pp. 1494-1499, 2007
Grzegorz Cielniak, Achim Lilienthal and Tom Duckett, Improved Data Association and Occlusion Handling for Vision-Based People Tracking by Mobile Robots, Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), San Diego, CA, USA, 2007.
André Treptow, Grzegorz Cielniak and Tom Duckett, Real-time People Tracking for Mobile Robots Using Thermal Vision, Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Vol. 54, No. 9, pp. 729-739, 2006