A robotics project of La Salle-URL won the "Best Paper Award" at the 2015 Congress RO-MAN in Japan

Adso Fernandez and David Miralles, from the Media Technology Group of La Salle Campus Barcelona, Jordi Albó of GRSETAD and the student Roger Boldu have obtained the Best Paper Award of 2015 RO-MAN , one of the congresses of reference on issues of Robotics held in Japan. The work presented deals with the use of a "VLEO" a virtual dinosaur character capable of interacting with "PLEO", a social robot also with a dinosaur shape. In addition, the "VLEO" is a virtual agent that improves the quality of interaction between children and robots. The work is part of the project   Patricia, where the use of pet robots is studied to make the stay of children in hospital environments much more bearable (preoperative wards, oncology floors, etc.) and to reduce anxiety and stress. The experiment was presented at the IEEE  Symposium on robots and interactive communication of humans, which took place from August 31st to September the 4th in Kobe, Japan. The central theme of the conference this year has been the interaction with socially integrated robots. The IEEE RO-MAN 2015 was marked by conferences where speakers and participants had the opportunity to discuss and share their views on new technologies to achieve socially integrated robots, robot design with a real application, the trial of using a robot in a practical field research and social acceptance of a robot.