Competency Goals:

Students know the foundations of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) and Social Robotics, including: design principles and methodologies, human factors influencing HRI (anthropomorphization), sensors, actuators and software architecture for social robotics, challenges and solutions for key abilities of social robots (spatial interaction, engagement detection, non-verbal interaction, verbal interaction, emotion generation and detection), research methods (study design principles, statistical tools for analyses) and have seen state-of-the-art research topics in the field including social learning, theory of mind, trust and ethical considerations in HRI.

Thanks to the exercise sessions and assignments, students gain first-hand knowledge and can independently apply techniques related to the above theory items, including for collecting stakeholders’ feedback for a robot design, programming the robot’s social behaviour along multiple modalities, extracting relevant user information from available sensors, designing and analysing HRI experiments.

Content
Subject-specific, methodological, practical and interdisciplinary content

Workload

1)    Attendance of the course: 22.5h (15x90min slots)

2)    Attendance of the exercise sessions: 22.5h (15x90min slots)

3)    Self-study of course material and work on homework assignments: 60h (4h/week)

4)    Preparation for the exam: 80h

Competency certificate

The assessment is carried out as a written examination (§ 4 Abs. 2 No. 1 SPO) lasting 120 minutes (counting for 60% of the grade)

PLUS

The assessment is carried out in form of course work (German Studienleistung, § 4 Abs. 3 SPO) (collectively counting for 40% of the grade). Students must regularly submit exercise sheets. The number of exercise sheets and the scale for passing will be announced at the beginning of the course. The assessment can only be repeated once.