The PERSEO Project has started

PERSEO is a H2020 Project which puts together an Education and Training Network on PErsonalized Robotics as SErvice Oriented applications. PERSEO - aims at training a new generation of research and professional figures able to face the research challenges of the market of personal robots. The personal robotics domain presents several research challenges mainly related to the need for a high degree of personalization of the robot behaviour with respect to the specific user’s needs and preferences. Companies need to build solutions rooted in a deeper analysis of humans’ specificities before developing products for people. At the same time, academia needs to nurture the development of an extended research community with a set of interdisciplinary skills to investigate different robot’s capabilities for understanding and modelling the interaction with human beings, for adapting the robot’s behaviour to the context, and software integration mechanisms that allow an easy personalized configuration approach to limit the static and costly customization processes of a novel robotic system.

The PERSEO’s research program is organized into three Research Themes aimed at investigating personalization of robot capabilities at different levels of possible human-robot interaction, namely “Physical”, “Cognitive”, and “Social”. This requires a set of research skills ranging from computer science and AI to automation, ethics, and psychology. Fellows will deepen their knowledge in projects covering a specific research theme but, through training events, secondments, and peer collaborations will gain extensive knowledge in other areas so leading to a multidisciplinary research programme and the integration with other projects to achieve the proposed Integration Milestones. The project also aims at training Early Stage Researchers to address social, legal, and ethical issues that arise by the uptake of personal robots, as such skills are fundamental to achieve technological innovation which aligns with European social, ethical al legal values.

Andrea Bertolini is part of the Project and will be training and supervising one Early Stage Researcher which will carry out the following activities:

• Study, analysis and discussions the legal, social and ethical problems on human-robot interaction;
• Research and identify of criteria for the development of ethically aligned design and pleasant robots;
• Elaborate policy guidelines on the topic;