WYSIWYD

The WYSIWYD project [What You Say Is What You Did]  http://wysiwyd.specs-lab.com/ will create a new transparency in human-robot interaction (HRI) by allowing robots to both understand their own actions and those of humans, and to interpret and communicate these in human compatible intentional terms expressed as a language-like communication channel we call WYSIWYD Robotese (WR). WYSIWYD will advance this critical communication channel following a biologically and psychologically grounded developmental perspective allowing the robot to acquire, retain and express WR dependent on its individual interaction history. In order to achieve transparency and communication in HRI a number of elements must be put in place: a well defined experimental paradigm, an integrated architecture for perception, cognition, action and intrinsic motivation that, among other things, provides the backbone for the acquisition of an autonomous communication structure, a mechanism of robot self that together with mirroring mechanisms allows for mind reading, an autobiographical memory that compresses data streams and develops a personal narrative of the interaction history, a conceptual space that provides for an interface from memory to linguistic structures and their expression in speech and communicative actions. WYSIWYD will deliver these components as elements of an integrated architecture WR-DAC.

Project Objectives

The WYSIWYD project will advance all these elements building on the strong track record of the project partners in robotics, cognitive science, psychology and computational neuroscience. WYSIWYD will contribute to a qualitative change in human-robot interaction (HRI) and cooperation, unlocking new capabilities and application areas together with enhanced safety, robustness and monitoring. It is only through this step that humans will be able to trust robots: when they say what they do and do what they say.

Project Consortium

Universitat Pompeu Fabra, UPF, Spain
The University of Sheffield, USFD, UK
Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia, IIT, Italy
Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, Imperial, UK
Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale INSERM, France
Lunds Universitet, Lund, Sweden

This project has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7-ICT-2013-10) under grant agreement n° 612139.

– Starting date: 01/01/2014
– Duration: 36 months