A pan-European team of robotics researchers has begun a project this year that could give humanoid bots the social skills necessary to deal with small groups of people by by building algorithms that will enable bots to mimic the “cocktail party effect” — the human ability to focus attention on just one person in the midst of other people, voices, and background noise.

The team will also explore the possibility of using gesture recognition algorithms to help the bot identify which people want to communicate with it.