Soft Sensors to Measure Somatic Sensations and Emotions of a Humanoid Robot.

The challenge faced in this work is to design and implement an artificial somatosensory system for a humanoid robot, able to produce somatic sensations and emotions starting from the measures achieved by basic robot's sensors. From a metrological point of view, it comes to obtain qualitative quantities (the sensations and the emotions) from a set of measurable physical ones (the sensors measures) in according to appropriate bio-inspired models. In a such a process of measure are also involved semantic aspects transforming low-level data in a richer information. The soft sensor paradigm was adopted to implement the artificial somatosensory system. The Somatosensory system plays a crucial role in preserving the body from damage or accident influencing our behaviors. So, a humanoid robot owning an artificial somatosensory system would be particularly desirable.