Explorations on Time-informed Human-Robot Interaction

The sense of time is an essential capacity of humans, with a major role in many of the cognitive processes expressed in our daily lifes. So far, in cognitive science and robotics research, mental capacities have been investigated in a theoretical and modeling framework that largely neglects the flow of time. Only recently there has been a rather limited, but constantly increasing interest in the temporal aspects of cognition, integrating time into a range of different models of perceptuo-motor capacities. The current paper aims to review recent work conducted in the Computational Vision and Robotics Laboratory of FORTH-ICS, in a well focused attempt to provide robots with temporal cognition and thus facilitate their seamless integration into modern human societies.