This paper presents an environment for design of interactive behaviors for social robots. Its structure consists of three levels which are: perception, decision and action. Their principles are briefly described and we detail more specifically implementation of people searching and monitoring in cluttered environments. We describe in particular the methods for people detection, state estimation and trajectory generation for interactive monitoring. We demonstrate experimentally that the designed reasoning system is able to regulate the robot behavior in complex situations. The robustness of the framework is evaluated experimentally for person following in his home space that may lead the system to lose the person detection because of occlusions and to use shortcuts.

In this paper, we present a human detection system for a domestic robot. A 2D laser scanner based leg detector and a vision based body detector are combined using a grid fusion strategy. This approach has been evaluated on a domestic robot. Furthermore, we propose a methodology to evaluate it in relation to proxemics that could be generalized to other robot's perceptive functions.

Human-robot interaction (HRI) takes place especially through interfaces. The design of such interfaces is a very delicate and crucial phase because it influences the robot accessibility and usability by the user. In this paper, we describe and analyze the results of 2 tests conducted so as to understand some of the optimal features that should characterize the robot voice and graphical-based user interfaces. Our test platform is an assistive robot developed for the elderly with mild cognitive impairments. Therefore, the user interfaces must be clear and simple. The ambiguities must be eliminated so as to facilitate the use of the robot and hence not to discourage the elderly population to use new technologies.