MIRA: A Learning Multimodal Interactive Robot Agent

In this paper we present a robotic head MIRA (multimodal interactive robot agent) which has been developed for studying the learning of human robot interaction and improving our understanding of human robot interaction techniques. In this paper we focus on two main aspects of the system; first, we describe how the robot head learns to recognise faces for supporting the interaction process between a human and MIRA. Second, we show how MIRA can learn to identify sound sources of interest and attend to the source location improving the social interaction effect. We propose that there is substantial potential for learning visual and auditory features in order to increase adaptability and robustness of robotic heads.