Our research focused on ensemble musical performance, an ideal test-bed for the development of models and techniques for measuring creative social interaction in an ecologically valid framework. Starting from expressive behavioral data of a string quartet, this paper addresses the application of Multi-Scale Entropy method to investigate dominance.

This work aims at defining a computational model of human emotional entrainment. Music, as a non-verbal language to express emotions, is chosen as an ideal test bed for these aims. We start from multimodal gesture and motion signals, recorded in a real world collaborative condition in an ecological setting. Four violin players were asked to play, alone or in duo, a music fragment in two different perceptual feedback modalities and in four different emotional states. We focused our attention on phase synchronisation of the head motions of the players. From observation by subjects (musicians and observers), an evidence of entrainment emerges between players. The preliminary results, based on a reduced data set, however do not grasp fully this phenomenon. A more extended analysis is current subject of investigation.

This paper deals with a method to design the control architecture for mobile robots. A Petri net-based approach is extended in this work to deal with uncontrollable events. In particular, the case where an uncontrollable transition is present in the model of the task is tackled. This situation may arise, for example, when taking into account the initialization phase of the estimators.

The problem of designing an interface between the continuous-state and the discrete-state domains of intelligent control architectures is addressed, focusing on the case of a hierarchical navigation, guidance and control (NGC) architecture for unmanned underwater vehicles. The proposed interface represents the underlying continuous-state execution level as a discrete event system using a Petri net formalism. The correct behavior of the execution level is ensured, checking that no forbidden state is reached and that the proper task activation and deactivation order is respected. Methodologies for the off-line generation of the Petri net representation of the execution level and automatic system reconfiguration are presented.