The cooperation between humans and robots is becoming increasingly important in our society. Consequently, there is a growing interest in the development of models that can enhance and enrich the interaction between humans and robots. A key challenge in the Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) field is to provide robots with cognitive and affective capabilities, by developing architectures that let them establish empathetic relationships with users. Over the last several years, multiple models were proposed to face this open-challenge. This work provides a survey of the most relevant attempts/works. In details, it offers an overview of the architectures present in literature focusing on three specific aspects of HRI: the development of adaptive behavioral models, the design of cognitive architectures, and the ability to establish empathy with the user. The research was conducted within two databases: Scopus and Web of Science. Accurate exclusion criteria were applied to screen the 4916 articles found. At the end, 56 articles were selected. For each work, an evaluation of the model is made. Pros and cons of each work are detailed by analyzing the aspects that can be improved to establish an enjoyable interaction between robots and users.

As the elderly population grows, there is a need for caregivers, which may become unsustainable for society. In this situation, the demand for automated help increases. One of the solutions is service robotics, in which robots have automation and show significant promise in working with people. In particular, household settings and aged people’s homes will need these robots to perform daily activities. Clothing manipulation is a daily activity and represents a challenging area for a robot. The detection and classification are key points for the manipulation of clothes. For this reason, in this paper, we proposed to study fashion image classification with four different neural network models to improve apparel image classification accuracy on the Fashion-MNIST dataset. The network models are tested with the highest accuracy with a Fashion-Product dataset and a customized dataset. The results show that one of our models, the Multiple Convolutional Neural Network including 15 convolutional layers (MCNN15), boosted the state of art accuracy, and it obtained a classification accuracy of 94.04% on the Fashion-MNIST dataset with respect to the literature. Moreover, MCNN15, with the Fashion-Product dataset and the household dataset, obtained 60% and 40% accuracy, respectively.

A safe and versatile interaction between humans and objects is based on tactile and visual information. In literature, visual sensing is widely explored compared to tactile sensing, despite showing significant limitations in environments with an obstructed view. Tactile perception does not depend on those factors. In this paper, a Machine Learning-based tactile object classification approach is presented. The hardware setup is composed of a 3-finger-gripper of a robotic manipulator mounted on the Doro robot of the Robot-Era project. This paper’s main contribution is the augmentation of the custom 20 class 2000 sample tactile time-series dataset using random jitter noise, scaling, magnitude, time warping, and cropping. The effect on the object recognition performance of the dataset expansion is investigated for the neural network architectures MLP, LSTM, CNN, CNNLSTM, ConvLSTM, and deep CNN (D-CNN). The data augmentation methods brought a statistically significant object classification accuracy increase compared to models trained on the original dataset. The best tactile object classification success rate of 72.58% is achieved for the D-CNN trained on an augmented dataset derived from scaling and time warping augmentation.

Vision-based pose detection and grasping complex-shaped and thin objects are challenging tasks. We propose an architecture that integrates the Generative Grasping Convolutional Neural Network (GG-CNN) with depth recognition to identify a suitable grasp pose. First, we construct a training dataset with data augmentation to train a GG-CNN with only RGB images. Then, we extract a segment of the tool using a color segmentation method and use it to calculate an average depth. Additionally, we apply and evaluate different encoder–decoder models with a GG-CNN structure using the Intersection Over Union (IOU). Finally, we validate the proposed architecture by performing real-world grasping and pick-and-place experiments. Our framework achieves a success rate of over 85.6% for picking and placing seen surgical tools and 90% for unseen surgical tools. We collected a dataset of surgical tools and validated their pick and place with different GG-CNN architectures. In the future, we aim to expand the dataset of surgical tools and improve the accuracy of the GG-CNN.

Human pose estimation and action recognition have received attention due to their critical roles in healthcare monitoring, rehabilitation, and assistive technologies. In this study, we proposed a novel architecture named Transformer-based Encoder–Decoder Network (TED-Net) designed for estimating human skeleton poses from Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI). TED-Net integrates convolutional encoders with transformer-based attention mechanisms to capture spatiotemporal features from CSI signals. The estimated skeleton poses were used as input to a customized Directed Graph Neural Network (DGNN) for action recognition. We validated our model on two datasets: a publicly available multi-modal dataset for assessing general pose estimation, and a newly collected dataset focused on fall-related scenarios involving 20 participants. Experimental results demonstrated that TED-Net outperformed existing approaches in pose estimation, and that the DGNN achieves reliable action classification using CSI-based skeletons, with performance comparable to RGB-based systems. Notably, TED-Net maintains robust performance across both fall and non-fall cases. These findings highlight the potential of CSI-driven human skeleton estimation for effective action recognition, particularly in home environments such as elderly fall detection. In such settings, Wi-Fi signals are often readily available, offering a privacy-preserving alternative to vision-based methods, which may raise concerns about continuous camera monitoring.