Abel

DEMO

Enzo Pasquale Scilingo

University of Pisa

Abel is a hyper-realistic humanoid robot designed to engage in natural and emotionally expressive interactions with humans. Resembling a 12-year-old child, Abel features 43 servo motors that enable nuanced facial expressions, realistic gaze, and coordinated movements of the neck, arms, and hands. Its design is complemented by multimodal sensing systems that allow it to perceive human emotions through facial cues, gestures, vocal prosody, and physiological signals.

Abel is built upon a modular cognitive architecture inspired by biological systems. This architecture integrates various components, including neural networks for perceptual processing, large language models (LLMs) for language generation, vision-language models (VLMs), a rule-based expert system for symbolic reasoning, and an extensive network of sensors. These modules interact dynamically to process context, coordinate verbal and nonverbal responses, and adapt behavior in real time.

Recent experimental studies confirm that Abel’s physical embodiment, combined with its cognitive architecture, significantly enhances the perception of human-likeness, sociability, and emotional engagement during human–robot interactions. These findings underscore the importance of combining embodiment with modular, emotion-aware processing in the development of next-generation social robots.