Advanced Usability Through Constrained Multi Modal Interactive Strategies: The CookieBot Service robots are becoming able to perform a variety of tasks and they are currently used for many different applications. For this reason people with different backgrounds and also without robotic experience need to interact with them. Enabling the user to control the motion of the robot endeffector, it is important to provide an easy and intuitive interface. In this work we propose an intuitive method for the control of a robot TCP position and orientation. This is done taking into account the robot kinematics in order to avoid dangerous configuration and defining rotational constraints. The user is enabled to interact with the robot and control its endeffector using a set of objects tracked by a camera system. The autonomy level of the robot changes depending on the different phases of the interaction for a better efficiency. An intuitive GUI has been developed to ease the interaction and help the user to achieve a better precision in the control. This is possible also through the scaling of the tracked motion, which is represented as visual feedback. We tested the system through multiple experiments that took into account how people with no experience interact with the robot and the precision of the method.

Generation of expressive motions for a tabletop robot interpolating from handmade animations Motion is an important modality for humanrobot interaction. Besides a fundamental component to carry out tasks, through motion a robot can express intentions and expressions as well. In this paper, we focus on a tabletop robot in which motion, among other modalities, is used to convey expressions. The robot incorporates a set of preprogrammed motion animations that show different expressions with various intensities. These have been created by designers with expertise in animation. The objective in the paper is to analyze if these examples can be used as demonstrations, and combined by the robot to generate additional richer expressions. Challenges are the representation space used, and the scarce number of examples. The paper compares three different learning from demonstration approaches for the task at hand. A user study is presented to evaluate the resultant new expressive motions automatically generated by combining previous demonstrations.