Feelix Growing is a robotics project that focuses on the development and evaluation of the adaptive simulation of emotion and affective response in humanoid robots.
Feelix Growing is a large EU funded project that involves a consortium of institutions and corporations. These include; the Adapative Research Group at the University of Hertfordshire, The Emotion Centre at the French National Centre of Scientific Reserach, The Neurocybernetics team at the Equipes de Traitement de Images et du Signal and attached to the Cergy Pontoise University, The Learning Algorithms and Systems Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, The Centre for the Study of Emotion at the University of Plymouth, The Image, Video and Intelligent Multimedia Systems Lab (IVML) of the Institute of Communication and Computer Systems at the National Technical University of Athens, Entertainment Robotics – a spin off of the Adaptronics Group, and Aldebaran Robotics.
This network provides for an interdisciplinary approach to research in adaptive robotic systems that includes proficiencies across neural networks, ethology, psychology and psychopathology, linguistics and facial coding systems, adaptive control architectures, neuroscience, epigenetic robotics, and commercial and consumer robotics to name but a few.
The Project is led by the University of Hertfordshire Team with Lola Canamero operating as the project coordinator.
Feelix Growing is based on the assumption that robots functioning in interaction with humans beings in areas such as care-giving, patient monitoring, entertainment, or serving as companions, must be capable of ‘adapting to incompletely known and changing environments’ and of personal and personable interactions with their human users and partners’.
The project assumes that this end requires robots that can develop according to their social situation – or rather that the utility of robots in human environments will depend on social integration as an effective, agile, and adapatable mode of development within dynamic environments. In this sense the project represents an interesting vector in robotics – away from the emulation/simulation or reverse engineering of what are perceived to be human like qualities – and toward the engineering of an adaptable social assemblage that includes both robot and human/animal/organism.
The project has worked with commercial developers including the Aldebaran Robotics Corporation and their humanoid robot Nao to test the effect of simulating emotional response and reaction of robots. They have tested the social effects of introducing a emotionally responsive robost to the play environments of both human children and young chimpanzees. The focus on these projects is on the integration of the robot as a component within a wider social assemblage.