Designing robots with socio-emotional skills is a challenging research topic still in its infancy. These skills are important for robots to be able to provide not only physical, but also social support to human users, and to engage in and sustain long-term interactions with them in a variety of application domains that require human-robot interaction, including healthcare, education, entertainment, manufacturing, and many others. The availability of commercial robotic platforms and developments in collaborative academic research provide us a positive outlook, however, the capabilities of current social robots are quite limited. The main challenge is understanding the underlying mechanisms of the humans in responding to and interacting with real life situations, and how to model these mechanisms for the embodiment of naturalistic, human-inspired behaviors via robots. To address this challenge successfully requires an understanding of the essential components of social interaction including nonverbal behavioral cues such as interpersonal distance, body position, body posture, arm and hand gestures, head and facial gestures, gaze, silences, vocal outbursts and their dynamics. To create truly intelligent social robots, these nonverbal cues need to be interpreted to form an understanding of the higher level phenomena including first-impression formation, social roles, interpersonal relationships, focus of attention, synchrony, affective states, emotions, and personality, and in turn defining optimal protocols and behaviors to express these phenomena through robotic platforms in an appropriate and timely manner. Achieving this goal requires the fields of psychology, nonverbal behavior, vision, social signal processing, affective computing, and HRI to constantly interact with one another. This Research Topic aims to foster such interactions and collaborations by bringing together the latest works and developments from across a range of research groups and disciplines working in these fields. The Research Topic is a collection of 14 articles that span across five research themes. Three articles co-authored by Terada and Takeuchi, Jung et al., and Kennedy et al. explore the design of “social and affective cues” for robots and investigate their effects on human-robot interaction. Mirnig et al., Bremner et al., and Strait et al. investigate people’s “perceptions of robots” in different settings and scenarios, such as when robots make errors. Articles by Lee et al., Leite et al., and Heath et al. investigate the factors that shape “dialogic interaction with robots,” such as interaction context. The articles under the theme “social and affective therapy” by Rouaix et al., Rudovic et al., and Matsuda et al. report on how individuals from clinical populations, such as those with dementia, autism, and other pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs), interact with robots in therapeutic scenarios. Finally, Miklósi et al. and Durantin et al. offer “new perspectives in human-robot interaction” with a focus on reframing social interaction and human-robot relationships. We are excited about sharing this rich collection with the scientific community and about its contributions to the human-robot interaction literature.

This book provides comprehensive, authoritative surveys covering the modeling, automatic detection, analysis, and synthesis of nonverbal social signals.

This book takes the vocal and visual modalities and human-robot interaction applications into account by considering three main aspects, namely, social and affective robotics, robot navigation, and risk event recognition. This book can be a very good starting point for the scientists who are about to start their research work in the field of human-robot interaction.

The idea that some day robots may have emotions has captured the imagination of many and has been dramatized by robots and androids in such famous movies as 2001 Space Odyssey's HAL or Star Trek's Data. By contrast, the editors of this book have assembled a panel of experts in neuroscience and artificial intelligence who have dared to tackle the issue of whether robots can have emotions from a purely scientific point of view. The study of the brain now usefully informs study of the social, communicative, adaptive, regulatory, and experimental aspects of emotion and offers support for the idea that we exploit our own psychological responses in order to feel others' emotions. The contributors show the many ways in which the brain can be analyzed to shed light on emotions. Fear, reward, and punishment provide structuring concepts for a number of investigations. Neurochemistry reveals the ways in which different "neuromodulators" such as serotonin, dopamine, and opioids can affect the emotional valence of the brain. And studies of different regions such as the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex provide a view of the brain as a network of interacting subsystems. Related studies in artificial intelligence and robotics are discussed and new multi-level architectures are proposed that make it possible for emotions to be implemented. It is now an accepted task in robotics to build robots that perceive human expressions of emotion and can "express" simulated emotions to ease interactions with humans. Looking towards future innovations, some scientists posit roles for emotion with our fellow humans. All of these issues are covered in this timely and stimulating book which is written for researchers and graduated students in neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, robotics, and artificial intelligence.

Can machines simulate, express or even have emotions? Is it a good to build such machines? How do humans react emotionally to them and how should such devices be treated from a moral point of view? This volume addresses these and related questions by bringing together perspectives from affective computing and emotional human-machine interaction, combining technological approaches with those from the humanities and social sciences. It thus relates disciplines such as philosophy, computer science, technology, psychology, sociology, design, and art. The volume offers readers interested in the phenomenon of emotional machines new perspectives from a variety of disciplines and addresses fundamental questions that will become pressing in the foreseeable future as emotional machines increasingly populate our everyday lives.

This book disseminates the latest research achievements, findings, and ideas in the robotics field, with particular attention to the Italian scenario. Book coverage includes topics that are related to the theory, design, practice, and applications of robots, such as robot design and kinematics, dynamics of robots and multi-body systems, linkages and manipulators, control of robotic systems, trajectory planning and optimization, innovative robots and applications, industrial robotics, collaborative robotics, medical robotics, assistive robotics, and service robotics. Book contributions include, but are not limited to, revised and substantially extended versions of selected papers that have been presented at the 2nd International Conference of IFToMM Italy (IFIT 2018).

"The Oxford Handbook of Affective Computing is a definitive reference in the burgeoning field of affective computing (AC), a multidisciplinary field encompassing computer science, engineering, psychology, education, neuroscience, and other disciplines. AC research explores how affective factors influence interactions between humans and technology, how affect sensing and affect generation techniques can inform our understanding of human affect, and on the design, implementation, and evaluation of systems involving affect at their core. The volume features 41 chapters and is divided into five sections: history and theory, detection, generation, methodologies, and applications. Section 1 begins with the making of AC and a historical review of the science of emotion. The following chapters discuss the theoretical underpinnings of AC from an interdisciplinary viewpoint. Section 2 examines affect detection or recognition, a commonly investigated area. Section 3 focuses on aspects of affect generation, including the synthesis of emotion and its expression via facial features, speech, postures, and gestures. Cultural issues are also discussed. Section 4 focuses on methodological issues in AC research, including data collection techniques, multimodal affect databases, formats for the representation of emotion, crowdsourcing techniques, machine learning approaches, affect elicitation techniques, useful AC tools, and ethical issues. Finally, Section 5 highlights applications of AC in such domains as formal and informal learning, games, robotics, virtual reality, autism research, health care, cyberpsychology, music, deception, reflective writing, and cyberpsychology. This compendium will prove suitable for use as a textbook and serve as a valuable resource for everyone with an interest in AC."--

The three-volume set CCIS 1419, CCIS 1420, and CCIS 1421 contains the extended abstracts of the posters presented during the 23rd International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, HCII 2021, which was held virtually in July 2021. The total of 1276 papers and 241 posters included in the 39 HCII 2021 proceedings volumes was carefully reviewed and selected from 5222 submissions. The posters presented in these three volumes are organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: ​HCI theory and methods; perceptual, cognitive and psychophisiological aspects of interaction; designing for children; designing for older people; design case studies; dimensions of user experience; information, language, culture and media. Part II: ​interaction methods and techniques; eye-tracking and facial expressions recognition; human-robot interaction; virtual, augmented and mixed reality; security and privacy issues in HCI; AI and machine learning in HCI. Part III: ​interacting and learning; interacting and playing; interacting and driving; digital wellbeing, eHealth and mHealth; interacting and shopping; HCI, safety and sustainability; HCI in the time of pandemic.

This book provides an overview of Educational Robotics and includes information that reflects the current status of the field, research activity, experiences, and new tools. It compiles the contributions presented at the 14th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE2023). Beyond insights into theoretical aspects, practical projects and syllabus activities exemplify the concepts and provide implementation ideas, which span the whole educational system from kindergarten to the university level. The relevance to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education is highlighted by teaching the topics in a unified framework. The book constitutes a valuable resource for educators, researchers, scientists, and engineers interested in robotics. It covers topics including school teaching curricula, educational methodologies and pedagogy, projects, competitions, hardware, simulations, programming, machine learning, and artificial intelligence in education.