This book explores an approach to social robotics based solely on
autonomous unsupervised techniques and positions it within a structured
exposition of related research in psychology, neuroscience, HRI, and
data mining. The authors present an autonomous and developmental
approach that allows the robot to learn interactive behavior by
imitating humans using algorithms from time-series analysis and machine
learning.
The first part provides a comprehensive and structured introduction to
time-series analysis, change point discovery, motif discovery and
causality analysis focusing on possible applicability to HRI problems.
Detailed explanations of all the algorithms involved are provided with
open-source implementations in MATLAB enabling the reader to experiment
with them. Imitation and simulation are the key technologies used to
attain social behavior autonomously in the proposed approach. Part two
gives the reader a wide overview of research in these areas in
psychology, and ethology. Based on this background, the authors discuss
approaches to endow robots with the ability to autonomously learn how to
be social.
Data Mining for Social Robots will be essential reading for graduate
students and practitioners interested in social and developmental
robotics.