Intelligent Robotics

Our current main track of research is Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). We work on two projects funded by the Swedish Research Council (VR):

• ROCC - Robots with Causal Capabilities [9]
• SCAI - Socially Competent AI [8]

Another important field of activity concerns Understandability in robotics [10] [11] [14] i.e. how robots should communicate the contents of their artificial minds to interacting humans. In this work we combine natural language understanding, dialogue management, intention recognition, and task planning.

Here are some videos exemplifying our recent work:

• debating robots
• understandable robot teams,
• adaptive HRI communication,
• robots in health care,
• polite and not-so-polite robots (coming soon). 

We have coordinated several EU projects in the HRI area:

• INTRO (FP7) on general HRI, and
• SOCRATES (H2020) - with a focus on robotics for older adults

Our research contributions in these projects are in the areas of sensory-motor learning, Learning From Demonstration [1] [2] [3], behavior/intent recognition [1] [12] [13].

For many years we worked intensively in Field Robotics, with research on automation in forestry. In particular, we developed techniques for autonomous forest machines  [15] [16] [17] [18][19] with generous financial support from the Kempe Foundations. In the FP7 project CROPS we developed robots for harvesting and spraying of fruit and vegetable crops, and continued in the H2020 project SWEEPER, where the consortium with joint efforts succeeded in developing the first sweet-pepper harvesting robot demonstrated in greenhouse environments [12].

When we feel the urge, we also contribute to the public debate on AI and robots in society [1] [2] [3] [5], and more philosophical questions such as embodiment [6].