The L2TOR project capitalises on recent developments in human-robot interaction in which the use of social robots is explored in the context of teaching and tutoring. Social robots have been shown to have marked benefits over screen-based tutoring technologies, and have demonstrable positive impacts on motivation in learners and their learning outcomes. L2TOR focuses on the domain of second language learning in early childhood: due to increased mobility of European citizens and increasing internationalisation, most children in Europe will be required to fluently use two or more languages. As language acquisition benefits from early, personalised and interactive tutoring, current language tutoring delivery is often ill-equipped to deal with this. As resources are insufficient to offer one-to-one tutoring with (near) native speakers in educational and home contexts, L2TOR will further the science and technology of language tutoring robots, with a strong focus on multimodal interactive tutoring for young children (4 years of age). L2TOR will focus on native speaking Dutch, German and Turkish children learning English. In addition, Turkish immigrant children in the Netherlands and Germany will be supported by a robot in acquiring Dutch and German. To realise this ambition L2TOR needs to address both technical aspects -such as multimodal interaction, human-robot interaction management and social signal processing-, pedagogical aspects -such as exploring the pedagogy of social robots and the use of social robot to assist in language tutoring- and developmental psychology aspects -such as understanding how children learn a first and second language from others and how this can be transposed to learning from robots.

The groundbreaking objective of CARESSES is to build culturally competent care robots, able to autonomously re-configure their way of acting and speaking, when offering a service, to match the culture, customs and etiquette of the person they are assisting. By designing robots that are more sensitive to the user’s needs, CARESSES’ innovative solution will offer elderly clients a safe, reliable and intuitive system to foster their independence and autonomy, with a greater impact on quality of life, a reduced caregiver burden, and an improved efficiency and efficacy. The need for cultural competence has been deeply investigated in the Nursing literature. However, it has been totally neglected in Robotics. CARESSES stems from the consideration that cultural competence is crucial for care robots as it is for human caregivers. From the user’s perspective, a culturally appropriate behavior is key to improve acceptability; from the commercial perspective, it will open new avenues for marketing robots across different countries. CARESSES will adopt the following approach. First, we will study how to represent cultural models, how to use these models in sensing, planning and acting, and how to acquire them. Second, we will consider three (physically identical) replicas of a commercial robot on the market and integrate cultural models into them, by making them culturally competent. Third, we will test the three robots, customized for three different cultures, in the EU (two cultural groups) and Japan (one cultural group), on a number of elderly volunteers and their informal caregivers. Evaluation will be conducted through quantitative and qualitative investigation. To achieve its groundbreaking objective, CARESSES will involve a multidisciplinary team of EU and Japanese researchers with a background in Transcultural Nursing, AI, Robotics, Testing and evaluations of health-care technology, a worldwide leading company in Robotics and a network of Nursing care homes.

The aim of personal robotics is to design companion robots that can live and interact with people in a very intuitive way. This requires designing robots that are capable of adapting to the human users, via learning during interaction. This proposal aims at the timely establishment of the first European Industrial Doctorate in “Applications of Personal Robotics for Interaction and Learning” (APRIL) to train future researchers and engineers for the emerging field of personal robotics. APRIL strategically adopts a key entrepreneurial ethos which will equip PhD students with radical cross-sector and interdisciplinary skills and mind-set, by combing research on developmental and social cognitive systems with hands-on experiments on the application of human-robot interaction and assistive systems. APRIL is the result of the strategic synergies of Plymouth University Centre for Robotics and Neural Systems with its international leadership and reputation as UK and European hub in cognitive developmental robotics and human-robot interaction, and with Aldebaran Robotics A-Lab R&D Division which has the world leading market position in the personal robotics industry with the robots NAO and Pepper. This is complemented by six international partners from industry (SONY Corporation, MetraLabs GmbH), academia (Osaka, Humboldt Berlin) and robot users (San Raffaele Hospital Milan and SSSA DomoCasa Pisa). The doctoral training strategy of the EID will implement the latest innovative PhD training approaches of situative and social constructivist learning theories with a unique Coaching Programme for a tailored Individual Skills Development Plan, peer-support and student-centred cohort activities, as well as a strong leadership skills programme for continuous professional development. The two beneficiaries will contribute with a pool of over 12 academic and industry supervisors and will fund 5 additional PhD bursaries to match the EID cohort of the 5 Marie Skłodowska-Curie funded ESR

In MuMMER ("MultiModal Mall Entertainment Robot"), we propose to address the important and growing market of consumer entertainment robotics by advancing the technologies needed to support this area of robotics, and also by explicitly addressing issues of consumer acceptance, thus creating new European business and employment opportunities in consumer robotics. Specifically, we will develop a humanoid robot (based on Aldebaran's Pepper platform) able to engage and interact autonomously and naturally in the dynamic environments of a public shopping mall, providing an engaging and entertaining experience to the general public. Using co-design methods, we will work together with stakeholders including customers, retailers, and business managers, to develop truly engaging robot behaviours, including telling jokes or playing games, as well as providing guidance, information, and collecting customer feedback. Crucially, our robot will exhibit behaviour that is socially appropriate, combining speech-based interaction with non-verbal communication and human-aware navigation. To support this behaviour, we will develop and integrate new methods from audiovisual scene processing, social-signal processing, high-level action selection, and human-aware robot navigation. Throughout the project, the robot will be deployed in a large public shopping mall in Finland: initially for short visits to aid in collaborative scenario development, co-design, and system evaluation, and later for a long-term field study in the 4th year of the project. Through our co-design approach, we will both study and foster acceptance of consumer robots and thus positively influence the consumer markets of service robots.

ANIMATAS will establish a leading European Training Network (ETN) devoted to the development of a new generation of creative and critical research leaders and innovators who have a skill-set tailored for the creation of social capabilities necessary for realising step changes in the development of intuitive human-machine interaction (HMI) in educational settings. This will be achieved through (1) a transnational network of universities and industrial partners that will supervise and deliver specialized training for early stage researchers (ESRs), and (2) the cross-fertilization of state-of-the-art methods from the domains of social robotics, embodied virtual characters, social and educational sciences in order to facilitate the development of skills necessary to design machines capable of engaging in intuitive sustained encounters with teachers and children. The ETN will ensure an integrative approach to the development of new capabilities with a view to their impact on whole system performance in terms of the complete HMI loop. This will be done by building industry–guided showcases that integrate the social capabilities developed by the ESRs. The participation of industrial partners will support the translation of new academic results to the market-place and a better transfer of knowledge between different sectors. The exposure of the non- academic sector to the ESRs has a great market potential that our industrial partners aim to capitalize upon in terms of recruiting young talents after the end of the project and adopting ANIMATAS’ advances in intuitive HMI for future product lines. This will greatly benefit the ESRs, which will be provided with new career perspectives in the social robotics and ed-tech industries. The ETN will strengthen Europe’s capacity in research and innovation by nurturing a new generation of highly skilled ESRs with an entrepreneurial mind-set and an understanding of intuitive HMI and potential products in these emerging markets.