SANDINI G.

Since infancy we explore novel objects to infer their shape. However, how exploration strategies are planned to combine different sensory inputs is still an open question. In this work we focus on the development of visuo-haptic exploration strategies, by analyzing how school-aged children explore iCube, a sensorized cube measuring its...

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The ability to recognize human partners is an important social skill to build personalized and long-Term Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). However, in HRI contexts, unfolding in ever-changing and realistic environments, the identification problem presents still significant challenges. Possible solutions consist of relying on a multimodal approach...

Humans are excellent at perceiving different features of the actions performed by others. For instance, by viewing someone else manipulating an unknown object, one can infer its weight–an intrinsic feature otherwise not directly accessible through vision. How such perceptual skill develops during childhood remains unclear. To confront this gap,...

The style of an action, i.e. the way it is performed, has a strong influence on interaction between humans. The same gesture has different consequences when it is performed aggressively or kindly, and humans are very sensitive to these subtle differences in others' behaviors. In this work we investigated how to endow a humanoid robot with...

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When faced with a novel object, we explore it to understand its shape. This way we combine information coming from different senses, as touch, proprioception and vision, together with the motor information embedded in our motor execution plan. The exploration process provides a structure and constrains this rich flow of inputs, supporting the...

Robots such as information security and overtrust in them are gaining increasing relevance. This research aims at giving an insight into how trust toward robots could be exploited for the purpose of social engineering. Drawing on Mitnick's model, a well-known social engineering framework, an interactive scenario with the humanoid robot iCub was...

It has been previously shown that the interaction between vision and audition involves early sensory cortices. However, the functional role of these interactions and their modulation due to sensory impairment is not yet understood. To shed light on the impact of vision on auditory spatial processing, we recorded ERPs and collected...

This paper proposes a method based on visual motion primitives to address the problem of action understanding. The approach builds in an unsupervised way a dictionary of kinematic primitives from a set of sub-movements obtained by segmenting the velocity profile of an action on the basis of local minima derived directly from the optical flow....

A social robot that's aware of our needs and continuously adapts its behaviour to them has the potential of creating a complex, personalized, human-like interaction of the kind we are used to have with our peers in our everyday lives. However adaptability, being a result of a process of learning and making errors, brings with itself also...

A social robot that is aware of our needs and continuously adapts its behaviour to them has the potential of creating a complex, personalized, human-like interaction of the kind we are used to have with our peers in our everyday lives. We are interested in exploring how would an adaptive architecture function and personalize to different users...

Spatial memory and imagery are high-level cognitive functions influencing everyday life. These processes are ascribed to the working memory system, devoted to the simultaneous maintenance and process of information. Despite the importance of the working memory system on cognitive development, quantitative assessment methods for cognitive...

In social interactions, human movement is a rich source of information for all those who take part in the collaboration. In fact, a variety of intuitive messages are communicated through motion and continuously inform the partners about the future unfolding of the actions. A similar exchange of implicit information could support movement...