HRI: Some results from ExCITE

In the last two years a group of ISTC scientists has been working in the ExCITE  project, approved by the EU Ambient Assisted Living Joint Program (AAL JP). They are responsible for the evaluation plan for the entire project.  ExCITE is promoting the use of a telepresence robot for facilitating socialization of older people.  A challenging goal in the project is the  one of bringing the robot in several real life settings for a time period long enough to allow habituation and possible rejection to appear.
The hard work performed is starting to pay off: the second week of September, at the RO-MAN conference in Paris, two presentations (one at the main conference, another at the SRT workshop) specifically concerned results from the CNR experimental work on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

• Tiberio, L., Cesta, A., Cortellessa, G., Padua, L., Pellegrino, A. R.,  Assessing affective response of older users to a telepresence robot using a combination of psychophysiological measures, IEEE RO-MAN 2012: The 21st IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication. pp. 833-838, September 9-13, 2012. Paris, France
• Cesta, A., Cortellessa, G., Orlandini, A., Tiberio, L.  Into the Wild: Pushing a Telepresence Robot Outside the Lab.  Proceedings on RO-MAN 2012 Workshop on Social Robotic Telepresence (SRT), pp. 7-14, September 9, 2012. Paris, France

The last week of September the project results have been also presented to the broad audience of the annual AAL Forum in Eindhoven in both a session on robotics and an open meeting with senior citizens.  The project will end December 2013, hence a lot of additional relevant data will be gathered in the further period of study.