BUSSARD

 

BUSSARD – Better Understanding Social Situations for Awareness in Robot Decision Making

In the BUSSARD project we create a corpus dataset of different social context situations in an office setting for further disciplinary and interdisciplinary research in computer vision, psychology, and human-robot-interaction. For social robots to be able to behave appropriately, they need to be aware of the social context they act in. Consider, for example, a robot with the task to deliver a personal message to a person. If the person is arguing with an office mate at the time of message delivery, it might be more appropriate to delay playing the message as to respect the recipient’s privacy and not to interfere with the current situation. This can only be done if the situation is classified correctly and in a second step if an appropriate behavior is chosen that fits the social situation. The BUSSARD project aims to enable robots accomplishing the task of classifying social situations by creating a large dataset composed of semantically annotated video scenes of office situations from a television soap opera. The dataset can then serve as a basis for conducting research in both computer vision and human-robot interaction.

The project is receiving funding (as item OPSF728) from an Open Seed Fund within the Exploratory Research Space of RWTH Aachen University.

Click here to see the ERS Project Support!