Guest Editorial A Sense of Interaction in Humans and Robots: From Visual Perception to Social Cognition

Abstract

Human ability to interact with one another is substantially strengthened by vision, with several visual processes tuned to support prosocial behaviors since early infancy. A key challenge of robotics research is to provide artificial agents with similar advanced visual perception skills, with the ultimate goal of designing machines able to recognize and interpret both explicit and implicit communication cues embedded in human behaviors. This special issue addresses this challenge, with a focus both on understanding human perception supporting interaction abilities and on the implementation perspective, considering new algorithms and modeling efforts brought forward to improve current robotics. This multidisciplinary effort aims to bring innovations not only in human–machine interaction but also in domains such as developmental psychology and cognitive rehabilitation.