Thesis Project Form

The ability to cooperate with peers and learn from them is one of the hallmarks of human behaviour. However, this process is not always straightforward, as it also requires trust and is influenced by social norms. This project aims at exploring the factors that modulate human adaptive behaviour and collaboration during interaction. These results will be used to improve cooperation in human-robot interaction, with the goal of designing robots able to fruitfully collaborate with humans in their everyday life.

The objective of the research is modeling the mechanisms that modulate human behavior during social interaction. We will explore how humans succeed in achieving mutual adaptation and cooperation and how informational factors (e.g., individuals skills, expertise) and normative ones (e.g., social norms, reciprocal trust) influence human behavior in interactive contexts. The next goal will be to investigate whether allowing robots to express this “human-like” behavior can guarantee cooperation between humans and robots. In particular, we will explore the factors that could lead us to 1) trust a robot and accept help from it, and 2) modify and adapt our behavior while interacting with a robot, in order to achieve efficient collaboration. The activities will include human psychophysical perceptual and motor testing, which will be employed to investigate the specific mechanisms underlying social learning, cooperation and adaptation in interactive tasks. The results will be used to develop a model of mutual adaptation ad cooperation in interaction, to be potentially implemented on an interactive robot.

Engineering tasks related to this study will include: kinematic data collection, development of the software for human perceptual testing. ?Research skills such as methods design, data analysis, data interpretation, statistical testing, modeling and signal processing will also be learned and exercised during this project.