Attentional human-robot interaction in simple manipulation tasks

We present a robotic control system endowed with attentional mechanisms suitable for balancing the trade off between safe human-robot interaction and effective task execution. These mechanisms allow the robot to increase or decrease the degree of attention toward relevant activities modulating the frequency of the monitoring rate and the speed associated to the robot movements. In this framework, we consider pick-and-place and give-and-receive attentional behaviors.