TERESA: A Socially Intelligent Semi−autonomous Telepresence System
Kyriacos Shiarlis‚ Joao Messias‚ Maarten van Someren‚ Shimon Whiteson‚ Jaebok Kim‚ Jered Vroon‚ Gwenn Englebienne‚ Khiet Truong‚ Vanessa Evers‚ Noe Perez−Higueras‚ Ignacio Perez−Hurtado‚ Rafael Ramon−Vigo‚ Fernando Caballero‚ Luis Merino‚ Jie Shen‚ Stavros Petridis‚ Maja Pantic‚ Lasse Hedman‚ Marten Scherlund‚ Raphael Koster and Herve Michel
Abstract
TERESA is a socially intelligent semi-autonomous telepresence system that is currently being developed as part of an FP7-STREP project funded by the European Union. The ultimate goal of the project is to deploy this system in an elderly day centre to allow elderly people to participate in social events even when they are unable to travel to the centre. In this paper, we present an overview of our progress on TERESA. We discuss the most significant scientific and technical challenges including: understanding and automatically recognizing social behaviour; defining social norms for the interaction between a telepresence robot and its users; navigating the environment while taking into account social features and constraints; and learning to estimate the social impact of the robot's actions from multiple sources of feedback. We report on our current progress on each of these challenges, as well as our plans for future work.