Dennys Paillacho

The absence of parental presence has a direct impact on the emotional stability and social routines of children, especially during extended periods of separation from their family environment, as in the case of daycare centers, hospitals, or when they remain alone at home. At the same time, the technology currently available to provide emotional support in these contexts remains limited. In response to the growing need for emotional support and companionship in child care, this project proposes the development of a multi-platform software architecture based on artificial intelligence (AI), designed to be integrated into humanoid robots that assist children between the ages of 6 and 14. The system enables daily verbal and non-verbal interactions intended to foster a sense of presence and personalized connection through conversations, games, and empathetic gestures. Built on the Robot Operating System (ROS), the software incorporates modular components for voice command processing, real-time facial expression generation, and joint movement control. These modules allow the robot to hold natural conversations, display dynamic facial expressions on its LCD (Liquid Crystal Display) screen, and synchronize gestures with spoken responses. Additionally, a graphical interface enhances the coherence between dialogue and movement, thereby improving the quality of human–robot interaction. Initial evaluations conducted in controlled environments assessed the system’s fluency, responsiveness, and expressive behavior. Subsequently, it was implemented in a pediatric hospital in Guayaquil, Ecuador, where it accompanied children during their recovery. It was observed that this type of artificial intelligence-based software, can significantly enhance the experience of children, opening promising opportunities for its application in clinical, educational, recreational, and other child-centered settings.

This paper presents an analysis of forward and inverse kinematics for a humanoid robotic head. The robotic head is used for the study of social human-robot interaction, such as a support tool to maintain the attention of patients with Autism Spectrum Disorder. The design of a parallel robot that emulates human head movements through a closed structure is presented. The position and orientation in this space is controlled by three servomotors. For this, the solutions made for the kinematic problem are encompassed by a geometric analysis of a mobile base. This uses a non-systematic method, called the geometric method that avoids the use of changing reference systems, and instead uses geometric relationships to directly obtain the position based on joint variables; and the other way around. Therefore, it converges in a few iterations and has a low computational cost.

Robotics is a field which does not only become more and more important in industry and production but is becoming part of many peoples every day life and as such, the interaction between robots and humans is an essential field of research. In this work, we present a face - being an important part of a natural communication - and show that animated facial expressions can be used to express the robot's emotions. To do so, we developed a set of animated facial expressions to be shown on the screen of the MASHI robot, a telepresence robot with a wide-screen display mounted on top. A survey was conducted to evaluate the recognition value of the facial expressions as well as to evaluate whether displaying the full face or rather just the eye-region affects this recognition rate. The evaluation of this survey shows that most of our emotions are recognized better if a mouth is provided. Yet, the recognition rate is still acceptable without displaying the mouth. In summary, all emotions were well recognized and therefore, displaying these on robots like MASHI will contribute to a more natural human-robot interaction.

This paper describes an exploratory study on group interaction with a robot guide in an open large-scale busy environment. For an entire week, a humanoid robot was deployed in the popular Cosmocaixa Science Museum in Barcelona and guided hundreds of people through the museum facilities. The main goal of this experience is to study in the wild the episodes of the robot guiding visitors to a requested destination focusing on the group behavior during displacement. The walking behavior follow-me and the face-to-face communication in a populated environment are analyzed in terms of guide–visitors interaction, grouping patterns and spatial formations. Results from observational data show that the space configurations spontaneously formed by the robot guide and visitors walking together did not always meet the robot communicative and navigational requirements for successful guidance. Therefore, additional verbal and nonverbal prompts must be considered to regulate effectively the walking together and follow-me behaviors. Finally, we discuss lessons learned and recommendations for robot’s spatial behavior in dense crowded scenarios.