Thesis Project Form

Each of us perceives the world differently. Despite these differences, humans are very good at coordinating efficiently and share perceptions with others. In Human-Robot interaction scenarios, these social perceptual mechanisms may be also useful in rehabilitation contexts.
For instance, understanding how sociality influences perceptual mechanisms could be crucial in optimizing and adapting rehabilitation paradigms involving robotic devices. Therefore, this project aims to explore the social factors that modulate human perception to contribute to the development of effective rehabilitative robotic frameworks aware of these social influences.

The objective of the research is to model the mechanisms that modulate human perception during social interaction. In particular, the project will investigate whether allowing robots to express social behaviors can lead to implicit changes in humans' perceptual mechanisms. Moreover, we will explore the factors that could lead us to 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 perceptual 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 assistive and rehabilitative robots.

Engineering tasks related to this study will include the experimental design of social signals for the behavior of the humanoid robot iCub, collection of proprioceptive data through the rehabilitation device WristBot, development of the software for human perceptual testing analysis. 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