WP3 – Human and Context Awareness

Social awareness is typically defined by several factors, such as cultural norms, social signals, and individual preferences of its inhabitants, and it is extremely dynamic and mainly shaped by human activities. For a robot to have social awareness, it needs to sense the environment and its inhabitants and be able to understand the contextual and social situation. In working, private, and public environments, robots may need to interact with human ‘users’, or simply share the same close space with other people who might only be present during short periods as bystanders. Service robots need to sense and interpret the current activities of agents in the environment to predict future situations, and to adapt their behaviours to fulfil their tasks in a socially and acceptable way. For service robots to be fully integrated into human environments, unique perceptual challenges are arising. For this reason, focuses on the necessity for service robots to obtain proper Human and Context Awareness (WP3).