Tutorial overview

Joint action, the coordination of individual actions by two or more participants working on a common goal, is the basis of many everyday social interactions between humans. However, even though humans engage in such activities, seemingly with ease, how well are the mechanisms underlying such behaviours understood? Can we build a robot that is able to work together with humans?

The aim of this tutorial is to give an introduction to several key technologies that are needed to build a human-robot joint action system. In particular, we explore the topic of joint action from the viewpoint of different research fields -including robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, computational linguistics, and psycholinguistics - all of which we believe contribute to our understanding of joint action. This tutorial will give a technical introduction to the software, tools, and methods that we are using to construct a robot capable of working with humans, in the context of JAMES, a European project exploring human-robot joint action and social interaction.

The talks in this tutorial will cover a variety of topics at the heart of joint action, including the collection and analysis of empirical data from human-human joint action studies, the requirement analysis and implementation of a robot capable of joint action with a human, algorithms for visual processing of human head pose and gestures, grammar-based speech processing and output generation, and knowledge-level planning with incomplete information.

Talks and slides

This tutorial was organised in the context of the JAMES project (Grant no. 270435, 2011-2014), funded by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Programme.