arXiv subjects

Antonio Sgorbissa

Publications and source records attributed to Antonio Sgorbissa.

24 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Knowledge Triggering, Extraction and Storage via Human-Robot Verbal Interaction

This article describes a novel approach to expand in run-time the knowledge base of an Artificial Conversational Agent. A technique for automatic knowledge extraction from the user's sentence and four methods to insert the new acquired concepts in the knowledge base have been developed and integrated into a system that has already been tested for knowledge-based conversation between a social humanoid robot and residents of care homes. The run-time addition of new knowledge allows overcoming some limitations that affect most robots and chatbots: the incapability of engaging the user for a long time due to the restricted number of conversation topics. The insertion in the knowledge base of new concepts recognized in the user's sentence is expected to result in a wider range of topics that can be covered during an interaction, making the conversation less repetitive. Two experiments are presented to assess the performance of the knowledge extraction technique, and the efficiency of the developed insertion methods when adding several concepts in the Ontology.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

A framework for Culture-aware Robots based on Fuzzy Logic

Cultural adaptation, i.e., the matching of a robot's behaviours to the cultural norms and preferences of its user, is a well known key requirement for the success of any assistive application. However, culture-dependent robot behaviours are often implicitly set by designers, thus not allowing for an easy and automatic adaptation to different cultures. This paper presents a method for the design of culture-aware robots, that can automatically adapt their behaviour to conform to a given culture. We propose a mapping from cultural factors to related parameters of robot behaviours which relies on linguistic variables to encode heterogeneous cultural factors in a uniform formalism, and on fuzzy rules to encode qualitative relations among multiple variables. We illustrate the approach in two practical case studies.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2018

Paving the Way for Culturally Competent Robots: a Position Paper

Cultural competence is a well known requirement for an effective healthcare, widely investigated in the nursing literature. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and sensitive to cultural differences while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. Drawing inspiration from existing guidelines for culturally competent healthcare and the state-of-the-art in culturally competent robotics, we identify the key robot capabilities which enable culturally competent behaviours and discuss methodologies for their development and evaluation.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Caring robots are here to help

Robots, along with sensors and telemedicine, have been identified as technologies that can assist and prolong independent living for older people, with robots especially being used to help prevent social isolation and depression.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2018

Modelling the Influence of Cultural Information on Vision-Based Human Home Activity Recognition

Daily life activities, such as eating and sleeping, are deeply influenced by a person's culture, hence generating differences in the way a same activity is performed by individuals belonging to different cultures. We argue that taking cultural information into account can improve the performance of systems for the automated recognition of human activities. We propose four different solutions to the problem and present a system which uses a Naive Bayes model to associate cultural information with semantic information extracted from still images. Preliminary experiments with a dataset of images of individuals lying on the floor, sleeping on a futon and sleeping on a bed suggest that: i) solutions explicitly taking cultural information into account are more accurate than culture-unaware solutions; and ii) the proposed system is a promising starting point for the development of culture-aware Human Activity Recognition methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2017

The CARESSES EU-Japan project: making assistive robots culturally competent

The nursing literature shows that cultural competence is an important requirement for effective healthcare. We claim that personal assistive robots should likewise be culturally competent, that is, they should be aware of general cultural characteristics and of the different forms they take in different individuals, and take these into account while perceiving, reasoning, and acting. The CARESSES project is an Europe-Japan collaborative effort that aims at designing, developing and evaluating culturally competent assistive robots. These robots will be able to adapt the way they behave, speak and interact to the cultural identity of the person they assist. This paper describes the approach taken in the CARESSES project, its initial steps, and its future plans.

cs.RO↗