The AMIGOS project is a Portuguese funded project (by FCT) that investigates the role of emotions and adaptation in interactions between a robot and a group of users, contrasting to the typical one-robot one user paradigm in HumanRobot Interaction (HRI).
In AMIGOS we address the issue of social adaptation for robots in group settings focusing on computational modeling of emotions. Emotions
play a critical role in HRI. Several authors have reported the relevance of emotions in the establishment of social interactions between one robot and one user, in particular the role of empathy. Despite these efforts, further research is necessary to verify whether similar results hold (1) when aiming for longer term social interactions, and (2) when the robot is in the presence of a group of people.
To endow a robot with the ability to cope with changes in the number of users around it, the AMIGOS project will use of interactive machine learning techniques that allow the robot to quickly adjust its behavior, depending on both the situational context (i.e., the number of users in the environment) and the preferences of a particular user, and generate adaptive social responses.
Ana Paiva 