Robots that help humans perceived as extensions of the body

A robot that helps perform some tasks is perceived by humans as an extension of their own body . For example, the hand of a humanoid robot that is helping to perform a task is considered part of its body schema. The discovery, published in the journal iScience, could help improve the design of robots used in close contact with humans, for example in motor rehabilitation .

The study, funded by the European Research Council, was conducted in Italy and the United States, coordinated by Alessandra Sciutti of the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genoa and in collaboration with Joo-Hyun Song's group at Brown University. It emerged that, as happens between humans, even when collaborating with a humanoid robot, unconscious mechanisms come into play , such as the cognitive process called the 'near -hand effect' , whereby the proximity of the hand to an object changes the person's visual attention , preparing them to use it . The research also considered the human brain's ability to create an extended body schema , which can also integrate objects. The result of a combination of an unconscious process and external stimuli , the body schema constructed by the human brain allows us to avoid obstacles or grasp objects without looking at them .

To study what happens in this mechanism when a human interacts with a robot , an experiment designed by Giulia Scorza Azzarà, a PhD student at IIT and the primary investigator of this study, was conducted. In this experiment, a person and the humanoid robot iCub collaborated to cut a bar of soap with a steel cable . It emerged that the robot's hand was perceived as a "close hand" only by humans who collaborated with the robot, especially if they considered it a competent and pleasant partner.