Module overview
This hands-on specialist module provides an in-depth understanding of Human Robot Interaction (HRI), focusing on the key modalities through which humans and robots interact, including verbal, non-verbal (such as pose and affect), spatial, and tactile interactions. Students will explore the sensors and actuators enabling these modalities and examine the underlying technologies, such as automatic speech recognition, human pose estimation, emotion recognition, and multimodal algorithms. The module emphasizes critical human factors in HRI, including safety, explainability, trust, shared autonomy and decision-making, and workload management. It introduces design methodologies to create HRI studies using simulations, wizard-of-Oz style tasks and real-world experiments and participatory approaches to create interactive robotics systems widely accepted by users. The module also covers evaluation techniques using both qualitative and quantitative methods. Finally, learners will investigate real-world HRI applications and use cases, including collaborative robots (cobots), social robots, and robots for wellbeing and education, equipping them with practical skills and theoretical knowledge to design and assess advanced HRI systems.