Within the Expressivity team, you will design software to ensure an expressive, natural and fun interaction between Softbank Robotics robots and the people around them.

The internship’s main contribution will be focused on designing and implementing an engine to parameterize multi-modal emotional expressions and non-verbal behaviors on Pepper. This will allow the robot to be able to decide how intense and frequent its expressions need to be, based on the flow of the interaction. You can draw inspiration from the state of the art in the field, as this recent work that has looked into a parameter-based model for head tilt and body expansiveness to express dominance in mood [1].

Main tasks include:

• Design and create an engine to parameterize non-verbal emotional expressions and gestures on the robot,
• Design and perform a user test to measure the perception and effect of the generated expressive behaviors,
• Integrate your model on our software and design a demonstration of the new feature on Pepper.

This work is part of the MSCA ITN – Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions project ANIMATAS (animatas.eu) part of European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 765955.

Requirements

You have a background in a robotics environment and/or human-robot interaction, human machine interaction, virtual agents, or affective computing. The ideal candidate will have the ability to write optimised algorithms and front-end applications for a robot.

Dynamic, autonomous and with good programming skills in an object oriented programming language ideally Java, Python, or C++. And you have a passion for human-robot interaction, artificial intelligence or cognitive science.

Prior experience with NAO or Pepper is highly appreciated.

Team working abilities needed.

Proficiency in English is a must.

This work may lead to further scientific publications.