About us

The primary research focus of LAPIS lies in robotics, cognitive informatics, and artificial intelligence. The lab is equipped with stationary industrial robots as well as custom-made cognitive robots, both mobile and stationary.

In the field of industrial robotics, LAPIS is dedicated to the development of Industry 4.0 principles and the creation of reconfigurable and adaptive robotics cells. Within cognitive robotics research, LAPIS concentrates on cognitive informatics, multimodal information fusion, affective and probabilistic robotics, artificial intelligence, context-driven reasoning and awareness, ubiquitous computing, and human-agent (robot) interaction.

A particular area of interest for LAPIS is the realization of context-aware agents across various working environments, including virtual, augmented, and real-world settings.

The latest ongoing research project, funded by the Croatian Science Foundation, is AMICORC—Affective Multimodal Interaction based on Constructed Robot Cognition. AMICORC aims to develop a prototype affective robot named PLEA, which can analyze and utilize behaviors through biomimicry (https://www.art-ai.io/programme/plea/). PLEA interprets social signals from its interactions, including facial emotions, ambient loudness, body movement intensity, and speech sentiment analysis. It then responds to these signals by generating visual information in the form of facial expressions.

PLEA actively participated in the Art & AI Festival in Leicester, the British Science Festival, and the World of Robots exhibition in Croatia, where it spent more than six months engaging in constant interaction. The collected data corpus is being used to build computational models to advance the state of the art in human-robot interaction (HRI), enabling PLEA to guide interactions toward specific goals, such as providing support or enhancing a person's mood. The reputable DailyArt Magazine ranked the PLEA installation among the best AI-based art installations in the UK for 2021 (https://www.dailyartmagazine.com/ai-art-installations/).