Group Intelligence on Social Robots

This PhD project aims at investigating how a social robot can adapt its behaviours to the group members in order to achieve more positive group dynamics, which we identify as group intelligence. This goal is supported by our previous work, which contains relevant data and insightful results to the understanding of group interactions between humans and robots. Finally, we examine and discuss the future work we have planned and what are the contributions to Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) field.

I. Introduction

The field of Human Robot Interaction (HRI) started to address group interactions in the past decade, contrasting to the most traditional dyadic settings, i.e. single human and single robot interactions. Consequently, the dynamics of groups where one or more robots engage with one or more people introduces a broad set of new research questions. For instance, Jung et al. posed the following question in [1]: “How can robots improve the performance of work groups and teams by acting on social processes?”.