Advanced Social Skills For Humanoid Robots

Lanxon writes "A pan-European team of robotics researchers began a project this year that could see humanoid bots interact with groups of people in a realistic, anthropomorphic way for the first time. The 'humanoids with auditory and visual abilities in populated spaces' (HUMAVIPS) project has the ambitious goal of making humanoid bots just a bit more human by building algorithms that will enable bots to mimic what psychologists call the 'cocktail party effect' — the human ability to focus attention on just one person in the midst of other people, voices and background noise."