back to top
Logo PAL Robotics

Summer 2021

A worldwide pandemic and the Brexit made it: after 6 years in the UK and 3 fantastic years at Bristol Robotics Lab, we are moving to Barcelona! and I am super excited to join PAL Robotics where I'll take the lead on the development of new social capabitilities for their service robots.

Cherry on the cake: PAL Robotics has a great community ethos. Expect our cool social tech to be open-source!

back to top

March 2021

Watch the 30min seminar I gave at the Bristol Robotics Lab, where I discuss what we have achived over the last 3 years in social robots and data-driven HRI at BRL, and present some ideas for where we should go next.

back to top
Screenshot of OfficeBots

November 2020

I am currently developing a new online tool to study social interaction in robotics, in a playful and... COVID-friendly way! I plan to have it both as a tool to teach robotics (incl. ROS) & human-robot interaction, but also as a research platform to conduct more immersive and interactive online studies.

First release expected early 2021. Stay tuned!

back to top

September 2020

Really excited to be starting soon (and despite the COVID pandemic!) an ambitious study in one of Bristol's schools for children on the autism spectrum. The project has already generated a fair bit of excitment, and I am both happy and lucky to work on it with the great UWE colleagues Nigel Newbutt and Louis Rice.

First focus groups with teachers and pupils slated for January 2021, with the study (we will leave a social robots for 3 weeks in the school) starting next Spring. (...in the meantime, programming time for me!)

back to top

December 2019

Since this month, I am now officially Associate Professor in Social Robotics and AI.

Big shout-out to Chris Melhuish and Tony Pipe who both tirelessly supported my application!

back to top

December 2019

I have been invite by the Research Executive Agency of the European Commission as a panelist to the Horizon 2020 MSCA cluster event "Artificial Intelligence". I did present some of the key challenges arising in social HRI, and child-robot interaction in particular, in front of about 150 participants, including the unit heads of several of the EU DGs. Policy making in the making!

back to top

October 2019

Very happy to announce that Emmanuel's landmark study on social robots automatically learning challenging social policies using Interactive Reinforcement Learning has been published in Science Robotics (open access)!

The article presents a novel human-in-the-loop machine learning approach to implement social autonomy in a robot, with several deployments in UK public schools. This is a first-in-kind demonstration of learning autonomous action policy in a high dimensional, socially complex, environment.

back to top

October 2019

With the brilliant Katie Winkle, we just completed an epic study: 9 participants, engaging for 3 months in exercise coaching with a socially autonomous robot! Paper to follow (as soon as Katie has finished writing her PhD thesis ;-) Big media coverage as well, with many radios and TV visiting us on campus!

Edit 2020 a first paper has been published at RSS. More to come soon!

back to top

August 2019

Following Maddy's paper last month, Chris's work on dynamic generation (and repair!) of ambiguous language for human-robot interaction has been published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (open access). Well done!

The article challenges the common understanding that robots should be unambiguous: we show that ambiguity is often desirable for fluid and natural human-robot interactions, and often lead to better performances, by not overloading the human participant with irrelevant informations.

back to top

July 2019

Just published! Madeleine's work on inferring internal states has been published in Frontiers in Robotics and AI (open access).

The paper investigates how partially hidden 'internal states' (like emotions, cooperativeness, etc) can be decoded from simple visible cues, like skeletons. Also demonstrates that social situations can be described along 3 simple dimensions: the imbalance of the interaction, its general valence, and the degree of engagement of the interactors.

back to top
Photo of the robot4SEN project in HK

July 2019

Inspiring visit in Hong-Kong, where I was invited as external expert to report on the findings of the Robot4SEN project: 70 robots deployed in 30 schools for children with special needs, over a period of 2 years. Fascinating and very humbling to see all these robots being adopted by pupils and teachers, and blended into the daily teaching!

Warm thanks to our hosts, the HK Vocational Training Council for the great organisation.

back to top
The PinSoRo dataset, visualised in matplotlib

January 2019

I gave this month a keynote at the UK Robotics & Autonomous Systems conference on HRI, cognition and 'bigg-ish data'. Slides are online!

back to top back to top back to top

Older news