NICO - Neuro-Inspired COmpanion: A Developmental Humanoid Robot Platform for Multimodal Interaction

Interdisciplinary research, drawing from robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science, is a cornerstone to advance the state-of-the-art in multimodal human-robot interaction and neuro-cognitive modeling. Research on neuro-cognitive models benefits from the embodiment of these models into physical, humanoid agents that possess complex, human-like sensorimotor capabilities for multimodal interaction with the real world. For this purpose, we develop and introduce NICO (Neuro-Inspired COmpanion), a humanoid developmental robot that fills a gap between necessary sensing and interaction capabilities and flexible design. This combination makes it a novel neuro-cognitive research platform for embodied sensorimotor computational and cognitive models in the context of multimodal interaction as shown in our results.

@InProceedings{KSMNHW17,
  author       = "Kerzel, Matthias and Strahl, Erik and Magg, Sven and Navarro-Guerrero, Nicol\'as and Heinrich, Stefan and Wermter, Stefan",
  title        = "NICO - Neuro-Inspired COmpanion: A Developmental Humanoid Robot Platform for Multimodal Interaction",
  booktitle    = "Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)",
  pages        = "113--120",
  month        = "Aug",
  year         = "2017",
  url          = "https://www2.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/wtm/publications/2017/KSMNHW17/NICO_RO-MAN_2017-PREPRINT-2017.pdf"
}