Raja Chatila, Sorbonne Universites and University of Paris, FR

The field of human-robot interaction is flourishing, enabled by new results in several areas such as perception, manipulation, action planning and control, inspired by theories about human-human interaction, and pulled by new needs for social or collaborative robots. The broad area of cognitive HRI addresses challenging issues such as detecting facial expressions and emotions, exhibiting emotions, understanding social signals such as postures and gestures, interpreting human activities and behaviors, detecting and reasoning on intentions, perspective taking, space sharing, cooperative and joint action planning and execution, etc. Several projects target specifically humanoid or android robots, motivated by the belief that such robots would be able to achieve more natural interactions with humans because their shape facilitates easier imitation of human gestures and expression of emotions. We shall overview a few of these cognitive capacities and consider their actual level of development, discussing how much they can actually be operational in the HRI context.