Maria Malfaz

University Carlos III de Madrid | UC3M · Department of Systems Engineering and Automation

Robots in multi-user environments require adaptation to produce personalized interactions. In these scenarios, the user’s feedback leads the robots to learn from experiences and use this knowledge to generate adapted activities to the user’s preferences. However, preferences are user-specific and may suffer variations, so learning is required to pe...

Technology favors better life expectancy, changing the population distribution. This change is known as population aging and brings a lack of care professionals for older and impaired people. Social robotics has become a promising alternative to alleviate this problem in recent years, assisting society. Human-robot interaction is a research area re...

Biological rhythms are periodic internal variations of living organisms that act as adaptive responses to environmental changes. The human pacemaker is the suprachiasmatic nucleus, a brain region involved in biological functions like homeostasis or emotion. Biological rhythms are ultradian (<24 h), circadian (∼24 h), or infradian (>24 h) depending...

The decisions made by social robots while they fulfill their tasks have a strong influence on their performance. In these contexts, autonomous social robots must exhibit adaptive and social-based behavior to make appropriate decisions and operate correctly in complex and dynamic scenarios. This paper presents a Decision-Making System for social rob...

La parálisis cerebral (PC) es la enfermedad motora más común en pacientes pediátricos, afectando su capacidad para moverse y mantener el balance corporal y la postura. Este estudio se enfoca en las terapias de rehabilitación robóticas, llevadas a cabo con la plataforma CPWalker, para la realización de ejercicios funcionales mediante movimientos pre...

Modelling the biology behind animal behaviour has attracted great interest in recent years. Nevertheless, neuroscience and artificial intelligence face the challenge of representing and emulating animal behaviour in robots. Consequently, this paper presents a biologically inspired motivational model to control the biological functions of autonomous...

In the last years, considerable research has been carried out to develop robots that can improve our quality of life during tedious and challenging tasks. In these contexts, robots operating without human supervision open many possibilities to assist people in their daily activities. When autonomous robots collaborate with humans, social skills are...

Social assistive robots are conceived to cooperate with humans in many areas like healthcare, education, or assistance. In situations where the workforce is scarce and when these machines work with special populations like older adults or children, the behavior must be appropriate and seem natural. In this contribution, we present a Deep Reinforcem...

Social robots coexist with humans in situations where they have to exhibit proper communication skills. Since users may have different features and communicative procedures, personalizing human–robot interactions is essential for the success of these interactions. This manuscript presents Active Learning based on computer vision and human–robot int...

The nervous system is controlled by a collection of neurons that transmit electric signals through the organism. These signals respond to internal and external stimuli and regulate many involuntary physiological functions. The autonomic nervous system regulates involuntary behaviors, such as heart rate, breathing, or pupil size through the action o...

Background Social robots have demonstrated promising outcomes in terms of increasing the social health and well-being of people with dementia and mild cognitive impairment. According to the World Health Organization’s Monitoring and assessing digital health interventions framework, usability and feasibility studies are crucial before implementing p...

Robots that are devised for assisting and interacting with humans are becoming fundamental in many applications, including in healthcare, education, and entertainment. For these robots, the capacity to exhibit affective states plays a crucial role in creating emotional bonding with the user. In this work, we present an affective architecture that g...

In human-robot interaction, different channels are used to communicate, voice being one of the most important. With the recent developments in natural language processing and learning techniques, machine learning models allow for many applications beyond the traditional ones, such as text generation, sentiment analysis or entailment, among others....

Adapting to dynamic environments is essential for artificial agents, especially those aiming to communicate with people interactively. In this context, a social robot that adapts its behaviour to different users and proactively suggests their favourite activities may produce a more successful interaction. In this work, we describe how the autonomou...

Social robots are intended to coexist with humans and engage in relationships that lead them to a better quality of life [...]

Travellers use the term waymarking to define the action of posting signs, or waymarks, along a route. These marks are intended to be points of reference during navigation for the environment. In this research, we will define waymarking as the skill of a robot to signal the environment or generate information to facilitate localization and navigatio...

During a human-robot interaction by dialogue/voice, the robot cannot extract semantic meaning from the words used, limiting the intervention itself. Semantic knowledge could be a solution by structuring information according to its meaning and its semantic associations. Applied to social robotics, it could lead to a natural and fluid human-robot in...

Robotic systems developed for social and dynamic environments require adaptive mechanisms to successfully operate. In consequence, learning from rewards has provided meaningful results in applications involving human-robot interaction. Nonetheless, in those cases where the robot’s state space and the number of actions is extensive, dimensionality b...

The unceasing aging of the population is leading to new problems in developed countries. Robots represent an opportunity to extend the period of independent living of the elderly as well as to ameliorate their economic burden and social problems. We present a new social robot, Mini, specifically designed to assist and accompany the elderly in their...

There are many situations in our daily life where touch gestures during natural human–human interaction take place: meeting people (shaking hands), personal relationships (caresses), moments of celebration or sadness (hugs), etc. Considering that robots are expected to form part of our daily life in the future, they should be endowed with the capac...

The success of social robotics is directly linked to their ability of interacting with people. Humans possess verbal and non-verbal communication skills, and, therefore, both are essential for social robots to get a natural human–robot interaction. This work focuses on the first of them since the majority of social robots implement an interaction s...

The success of social robots is mainly based on their capacity for interaction with people. In this regard, verbal and non-verbal communication skills are essential for social robots to get a natural human-robot interaction. This paper focuses on the first of them since the majority of social robots implement a Text to Speech system. We present a c...

Different technological devices such as mobile phones or smart speakers are quite useful for people to find information. However, these types of devices tend to ignore the older population by having complex or not very accessible user interfaces. Social robotics can enable access to online contents in a friendly way even for users that are unfamili...

In social robotics, there is a number of research works dealing with human interaction. Engaging and entertaining users is paramount to ensure a proper interaction. For this reason, games are proposed as a simple way to connect with people regardless of their age or preferences. In this regard, this paper proposes a set of guidelines or features th...

Human communication relies on several aspects beyond the speech. One of them is gestures as they express intentions, interests, feelings, or ideas and complement the speech. Social robots need to interpret these messages to allow a more natural Human-Robot Interaction. In this sense, our aim is to study the effect of position and speed features in...

Nowadays, robots and humans coexist in real settings where robots need to interact autonomously making their own decisions. Many applications require that robots adapt their behavior to different users and remember each user's preferences to engage them in the interaction. To this end, we propose a decision making system for social robots that driv...

The objective of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of mobile robots, presenting the main issues corresponding to these robots. A mobile robot can be dedicated to many different tasks (e.g., transport, manipulation, and exploration). !e chapter focuses on the topics associated with mobility, such as locomotion and navigation, which are com...

Nowadays, many robotic applications require robots making their own decisions and adapting to different conditions and users. This work presents a biologically inspired decision making system, based on drives, motivations, wellbeing, and self-learning, that governs the behavior of the robot considering both internal and external circumstances. In t...

In recent years, the demand for caregivers and therapists has raised together with the life expectancy. Elder people demand adapted environments and specialized care that allows for an active ageing. In order to assist in their daily tasks, social robots appear as a complement to caregivers. In this demo we introduce a robot capable to conduct cogn...

In recent years, the role of social robots is gaining popularity in our society but still learning from humans is a challenging problem that needs to be addressed. This paper presents an experiment where, after teaching poses to a robot, a group of users are asked several questions whose answers are used to create feature filters in the robot’s lea...

The external aspects of a robot affect how people behave and perceive it while interacting. In this paper, we study the importance of the mouth displayed by a social robot and explore how different designs of an artificial LED-based mouths alter the participants’ judgments of a robot’s attributes and their attention to the robot’s message. We evalu...

User detection, recognition, and tracking is at the heart of human–robot interaction, and yet, to date, no universal robust method exists for being aware of the people in a robot’s surroundings. The present article imports into existing social robotic platforms different techniques, some of them classical, and other novel, for detecting, recognizin...

In order to consider robots as social partners rather than mere machines, they have to be perceived as living entities. In this paper we present a system to improve the robot’s liveliness based on the execution of non-repetitive, unpredictable, subtle actions that are running continuously during the operation of the robot. The so-called Liveliness...

Projectors have become a widespread tool to share information in Human-Robot Interaction with large groups of people in a comfortable way. Finding a suitable vertical surface becomes a problem when the projector changes positions when a mobile robot is looking for suitable surfaces to project. Two problems must be addressed to achieve a correct und...

Robots are starting to be applied in areas which involve sharing space with humans. In particular, social robots and people will coexist closely because the former are intended to interact with the latter. In this context, it is crucial that robots are aware of the presence of people around them. Traditionally, people detection has been performed u...

El actual envejecimiento de la población, principalmente por el aumento de la esperanza de vida y las bajas tasas de natalidad, hace que la asistencia a las personas de edad avanzada en los países desarrollados sea un gran problema debido a cuestiones sociales y demográficas.. El objetivo principal del proyecto ROBSEN ha sido desarrollar robots par...

Social robots are intended to coexist and to communicate with humans in a natural way. This requires these robots to be able to identify people (and objects) around them to use that information during human-robot dialogs. In this work we present how electronic beacons can benefit the interactions between humans and social robots. In particular, Blu...

Decision-making is the natural way that makes any animal autonomous. To improve the autonomy of social robots, we propose to apply a bio-inspired decision-making system to manage the actions related with the human-robot interaction. In this paper, we present the system and how we apply it to one-by-one entertainment scenarios. Our robot has been eq...

This paper assesses how the accuracy in user’s answers influence the learning of a social robot when it is trained to recognize poses using Active Learning. We study the performance of a robot trained to recognize the same poses actively and passively and we show that, sometimes, the user might give simplistic answers producing a negative impact on...

There is a growing interest in the Human-Robot Interaction community towards studying the effect of the attitude of a social robot during the interaction with users. Similar to human-human interaction, variations in the robot’s attitude may cause substantial differences in the perception of the robot. In this work, we present a preliminary study to...

Robots have begun to assist elders and patients suffering dementia. In particular, recent studies have shown how robots can benefit Alzheimer's disease (AD) patients. This is a novel area with a promising future but lot of researching needs to be done. The RobAlz project is aimed to assist AD patients and their caregivers by social robots. This pro...

Active robot learners take an active role in its own learning by asking queries to its human teachers when they receive new data. However, not every received input is useful for the robot, and asking for non-informative inputs or asking too many questions might produce a negative impact on how the human perceives the robot. We present a novelty det...

Active robot learners take an active role in their own learning by making queries to their human teachers when they receive new data. However, not every received input is useful for the robot, and asking for non-informative inputs or asking too many questions might worsen the user's perception of the robot. We present a novelty detection system tha...

In this study, an autonomous social robot is living in a laboratory where it can interact with several items (people included). Its goal is to learn by itself the proper behaviors in order to maintain its well-being at as high a quality as possible. Several experiments have been conducted to test the performance of the system.The Object Q-Learning...

This paper presents a system in which a robot uses Active Learning (AL) to improve its learning capabilities for pose recognition. We propose a sub-type of Feature Queries, Rank Queries (RQ), in which the user states the relevance of a characteristic of the learning space. In the case of pose learning, these queries refer to the relevance of a sing...

In many occasions people need to go to certain places without having any prior knowledge about the environment. This situation may occur when the place is visited for the first time, or even when there is not any available map to situate us. In those cases, the signs of the environment are essential for achieving the goal. The same situation may ha...

Research on dialog systems is a very active area in social robotics. During the last two decades, these systems have evolved from those based only on speech recognition and synthesis to the current and modern systems, which include new components and multimodality. By multimodal dialogue we mean the interchange of information among several interloc...

In this paper, a multimodal user-emotion detection system for social robots is presented. This system is intended to be used during human-robot interaction, and it is integrated as part of the overall interaction system of the robot: the Robotics Dialog System (RDS). Two modes are used to detect emotions: the voice and face expression analysis. In...

The main activity of social robots is to interact with people. In order to do that, the robot must be able to understand what the user is saying or doing. Typically, this capability consists of pre-programmed behaviors or is acquired through controlled learning processes, which are executed before the social interaction begins. This paper presents...

Currently artificial emotions are being extensively used in robots. Most of these implementations are employed to display affective states. Nevertheless, their use to drive the robot's behavior is not so common. This is the approach followed by the authors in this work. In this research, emotions are not treated in general but individually. Several...

User simultaneous detection and tracking is an issue at the core of human–robot interaction (HRI). Several methods exist and give good results; many use image processing techniques on images provided by the camera. The increasing presence in mobile robots of range-imaging cameras (such as structured light devices as Microsoft Kinects) allows us to...

In this paper, a new path planning method for robots used in outdoor environments is presented. The proposed method applies Fast Marching to a 3D surface represented by a triangular mesh to calculate a smooth trajectory from one point to another. The method uses a triangular mesh instead of a square one since this kind of grid adapts better to 3D s...

This paper presents a user localization system based on the fusion of visual information and sound source localization, implemented on a social robot called Maggie. One of the main requisites to obtain a natural interaction between human-human and human-robot is an adequate spatial situation between the interlocutors, that is, to be orientated and...

This paper presents our experience in using different technologies to implement remote laboratories for educational purposes within the frame of the Bachelor in Automation and Industrial Electronics Engineering of the University Carlos III of Madrid, Spain. It is our aim to promote future engineers whose expertise goes beyond the theoretical approa...

In this paper, a new approach to the generation and the role of artificial emotions in the decision making process of autonomous agents (physical and virtual), is presented. The decision making system proposed is biologically inspired and it is based on drives, motivations, and emotions. The agent has certain needs or drives, that must be within a...

It is expected that in a near future, personal robots will be endowed with enough autonomy to function and live in an individual's home. This is while commercial robots are designed with default configuration and factory settings which may often be different to an individual's operating preferences. This paper presents how reinforcement learning is...

When a reinforcement learning agent executes actions that can cause frequent damage to itself, it can learn, by using Q-learning, that these actions must not be executed again. However, there are other actions that do not cause damage frequently but only once in a while, for example, risky actions such as parachuting. These actions may imply punish...

Autonomy is a prime issue on robotics field and it is closely related to decision making. Last researches on decision making for social robots are focused on biologically inspired mechanisms for taking decisions. Following this approach, we propose a motivational system for decision making, using internal (drives) and external stimuli for learning...

Lately, lots of effort has been put into the construction of robots able to live among humans. This fact has favored the development of personal or social robots, which are expected to behave in a natural way. This implies that these robots could meet certain requirements, for example, to be able to decide their own actions (autonomy), to be able t...

!e objective of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of mobile robots, presenting the main issues corresponding to these robots. A mobile robot can be dedicated to many di"erent tasks (e.g., transport, manipulation, and exploration). !e chapter focuses on the topics associated with mobility, such as locomotion and navigation, which are commo...

Autonomy is a prime issue on robotics field and it is closely related to decision making. Last researches on decision making for social robots are focused on imitating humans’ mind for taking decisions. Following this approach, we propose a motivational system for decision making using internal (drives) and external stimuli for choosing the right...

En este artículo se presenta, en forma de tutorial, una visión de conjunto de la situación actual del problema de la toma de decisiones en robótica. El estudio se plantea de forma amplia e integradora y, por tanto, intentando no entrar en detallar soluciones concretas para problemas también concretos. El artículo está centrado sobre todo en las dec...

This paper presents, as a tutorial, an overview of the current state of the decision-making problem applied to robotics. The study is approached in a comprehensive and inclusive way and, therefore, trying not to go into specific solutions for specific problems. The article is focused primarily on high-level decisions to be taken by a robot, not low...

This chapter is focused on how emotional intelligence is used in order to plan the most suitable path for a robot when fulfilling a certain task. Classic planners use several criteria such as the shortest path, or the minimum time, but those planners do not take into account some inner factors as human beings do in the decision making process. Thos...

In this paper, a modification of the standard learning algorithm Q-learning is presented: Object Q-learning (OQ-learning). An autonomous agent should be able to decide its own goals and behaviours in order to fulfil these goals. When the agent has no previous knowledge, it must learn what to do in every state (policy of behaviour). If the agent use...

Human-robot social interaction plays an important role in spreading the use of the robot in human daily life. Through effective social interaction, robots will be able to perform many tasks in the human society. These tasks may include, but not limited to, handling various house duties, providing medical care for elderly people, assisting people wi...

Emotions play a very important role in human behaviour and social interaction. In this paper we present a control architec- ture which uses emotions in the behaviour selection process of au- tonomous and social agents. The state of the agent is determined by its internal state, defined by its dominant motivation, and its rela- tion with the externa...

In this paper, we describe and show experimental results of a control architecture of behaviour se-lection designed for autonomous and social agents. Using a role-playing game we have created a virtual world where the agent interacts with different objects and other agents to survive. This game was built using a text based MUD (multi-user dungeon)....

This paper addresses the use of emotions on autonomous agents for behaviour-selection learning, focusing in the emotions fear, happiness and sadness. The control architecture is based in a motiva-tional model, which performs homeostatic control of the internal state of the agent. The behaviour-selection is learned by the agent using a Q-learning al...

This paper presents the performance of autonomous agents living in a role-playing game, where social interaction is allowed. These agents are controlled by an emotion-based architecture where the control architecture has a motivational model, which performs homeostatic control of the internal state of the agent. The agents learn the behaviour selec...

With the emergence of personal robots the need to create autonomous robots with an easier form of human-robot interaction has become apparent. Emotions will play an important role in the autonomy issue as well as in this interaction. In the proposed architecture emotions are generated from the evaluation of the wellbeing of the robot. Behaviour sel...

With the emergence of personal robots recently the need to create an easier form of human-robot interaction has become apparent. Emotions will play an important role in this interaction. In the proposed architecture emotions are generated from the evaluation of the wellbeing of the robot. Moreover, behavior selection mainly depends on a specific dr...

El objetivo de esta tesis es desarrollar un sistema de toma de decisiones para un robot personal social y autónomo. Este sistema consiste en varios módulos: el módulo motivacional, el módulo de los drives y el módulo de valoración y selección de comportamientos. Estos módulos están basados en motivaciones, drives y emociones, conceptos que son ampl...