TERESA: A Socially Intelligent Semi-autonomous Telepresence System

Abstract

TERESA is a socially intelligent semi-autonomous telepresence system that is currently being developed as part of an FP7-STREP project funded by the European Union. The ultimate goal of the project is to deploy this system in an elderly day centre to allow elderly people to participate in social events even when they are unable to travel to the centre. In this paper, we present an overview of our progress on TERESA. We discuss the most significant scientific and technical challenges including: understanding and automati-cally recognizing social behaviour; defining social norms for the interaction between a telepresence robot and its users; navigating the environment while taking into account social features and constraints; and learning to estimate the social impact of the robot’s actions from multiple sources of feedback. We report on our current progress on each of these chal-lenges, as well as our plans for future work