Academics from Edinburgh Centre for Robotics will be speaking at a special event at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) on Thursday 15 June as part of the range of activities planned around Heriot-Watt University’s Year of Robotics and UK Robotics Week.
Professor Ruth Aylett will speak on ‘Creating Robots that Care’. She will discuss her work on social robotics including robots that can provide support to help the elderly remain independent longer, and robots that encourage children to practice their homework. The talk will highlight the importance of embodiment, expressive behaviour, and sensitivity and responsiveness to human emotions.
Sharing the stage with Professor Aylett will be Dr Thusha Rajendran from Heriot-Watt University who will describe what the science of human robot interaction tells us about the psychology of human interaction. He will discuss how human robot interaction forces us to think about people interacting with other people as ‘systems’, as opposed to in isolation, and how Art, in the form of Science Fiction, has a long history of using robots to mirror our own psychology e.g.Data in Star Trek trying to understand human emotion.