Bringing Together Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology: Lessons Learned From an Interdisciplinary Project

Olga A Wudarczyk; Murat Kirtay; Anna K Kuhlen; Rasha Abdel Rahman; John-Dylan Haynes; Verena V Hafner; Doris Pischedda

doi:10.3389/fnhum.2021.630789

Bringing Together Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology: Lessons Learned From an Interdisciplinary Project

Front Hum Neurosci. 2021 Mar 29:15:630789. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2021.630789. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Olga A Wudarczyk¹, Murat Kirtay², Anna K Kuhlen¹, Rasha Abdel Rahman^{1

3}, John-Dylan Haynes^{3

4}, Verena V Hafner², Doris Pischedda^{4

5}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
² Adaptive Systems Group, Department of Computer Science, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
³ Faculty of Philosophy, Berlin School of Mind and Brain, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
⁴ Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Corporate Member of Freie Universität Berlin and Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany.
⁵ Milan Center for Neuroscience, Milan, Italy.

Abstract

The diversified methodology and expertise of interdisciplinary research teams provide the opportunity to overcome the limited perspectives of individual disciplines. This is particularly true at the interface of Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology as the three fields have quite different perspectives and approaches to offer. Nonetheless, aligning backgrounds and interdisciplinary expectations can present challenges due to varied research cultures and practices. Overcoming these challenges stands at the beginning of each productive collaboration and thus is a mandatory step in cognitive neurorobotics. In this article, we share eight lessons that we learned from our ongoing interdisciplinary project on human-robot and robot-robot interaction in social settings. These lessons provide practical advice for scientists initiating interdisciplinary research endeavors. Our advice can help to avoid early problems and deal with differences between research fields, prepare for and anticipate challenges, align project expectations, and speed up research progress, thus promoting effective interdisciplinary research across Robotics, Neuroscience, and Psychology.

Keywords: cognitive neurorobotics; collaboration; diversity; human-robot interaction; interdisciplinarity; robotics; social intelligence; social robotics.