Description

Robot House is a unique facility for researching human-robot interaction. It provides a realistic home environment where academic and industry researchers can test how robots can provide physical and cognitive support to humans and looks towards a future where robotic companions may play a greater role in caring for older people.

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Description

Kaspar is a child-sized humanoid robot designed as a social companion to improve the lives of children with autism and other communication difficulties.

By interacting and behaving in a child-like way, Kaspar helps teachers and parents support children with autism to overcome the challenges they face in socialising and communicating with others.

Description

While there is a consensus that integration between healthcare and social care is the necessary step to a sustainable solution for healthy ageing, significant challenges remain that affect such integration. Issues such as chronic staff shortages as well as social inequalities impact on such integration. We hypothesise that a sustainable healthy ageing is possible via 'virtual ward at home' concept, where elements of staff shortages and healthcare inequalities are targeted using virtualisation of a standardised service.

Description

SWAG aims to explore a fundamentally new approach to engineering soft structures that omit fully rigid materials for inflatable ones made from high-strength fabrics and films when manufacturing human-assistive exoskeletal devices that target strain-prone segments of the human body (i.e. lower body and core). Such soft wearable adaptive garments with actuation capabilities offer higher variable stiffness and force-to-weight ratios compared to other existing methods, and simultaneously entirely conform to each joint's intricate kinematics. Because of this, new design approaches can be used as building blocks to realise complete assistance for multi-degree-of-freedom joints, such as the ankle or hip, by adapting flexible and conforming motions achieved by continuum robot designs.

Description

The FLUIDITY project aims (1) to to develop a toolkit for building and testing interactive robot models in a simulated environment with human participants in a Virtual Reality (VR) HRI environment and (2) to increase the interaction fluidity between humans and robots when engaged in multimodal, physical interactions.

Description

The EMERGENCE network aims to create a sustainable eco-system of researchers, businesses, end-users, health and social care commissioners and practitioners, policy makers and regulatory bodies in order to build knowledge and capability needed to enable healthcare robots to support people living with frailty in the community.

Description

In this project, UH will help Heales Enterprises Ltd (HEL) to set up an automatic question generation system using advanced Machine Learning methods. This system will be used in Occupational Health Assessment. With the introduction of medically supported Artificial Intelligence (AI), HEL will gain a competitive advantage in the Occupational Health market. The AI will also enable auto-completion of Management Advice reducing OHA and, in future, OHP time to compile reports.

Description

EMBOA project (Affective loop in Socially Assistive Robotics as an intervention tool for children with autism) aims at the development of guidelines and practical evaluation of applying emotion recognition technologies in robot-supported intervention in children with autism. Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suffer from multiple deficits, and limited social and emotional skills are among those, that influence their ability to involve in interaction and communication.

Description

Whilst a vast amount of research has investigated communication interventions and their impact on children with Speech Language and Communication Needs (SLCN), the possibility of using state of the art robotics technology, specifically focused on SLC therapies has had very little investigation. This research will be a pioneering study, using the humanoid robot Kaspar as a therapeutic tool for children with learning disabilities in need of SLC therapies to investigate how robotic technology could help these children.

Description

The project focuses on identifying how causal explanation can influence trust in an educational robotic platform, the Kaspar robot. We hypothesise that a robot’s ability to explain its educational actions would make it a more trustworthy educational tool, for the pupils, their parents and their teachers. This may in turn make the robot-mediation more successful.

Description

This is a KTP application for joint-development of a cucumber harvest robot for harvesting cucucmber grown in a greenhouse.

Description

The goal of this proposal was to seek funding to extend the functionalities of the robotics hardware in the University of Hertfordshire's (UH) Robot House (RH), creating the Robot House 2.0 - and, importantly, to make it accessible to other research groups. RH2.0 was to become an easily accessible hub for UK universities and industry conducting research into smart home and robotics technology.

Description

The SocCred (Assuring safety and social credibility) project was a small feasibility project to identify and characterise the link between social credibility and safety, funded by the AAIP (Assuring Autonomy International Programme). An interactive experiment indicated that users are more likely to accept the safety assessment of a robot that they consider socially intelligent instead of one lacking social competency, which users considered necessary to cross-check these against their own experience.