Human-robot interaction

Human-robot interaction is the study of interactions between humans and robots. It is often referred as HRI by researchers. Human-Robot interaction is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from human-computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, and social sciences.

Origins

Human-robot interaction has been a topic of both science fiction and academic speculation even before any robots existed. Because HRI depends on a knowledge of (sometimes natural) human communication, many aspects of HRI are continuations of human communications topics that are much older than robotics per se.

The origin of HRI as a discrete problem was stated by 20th-century author Isaac Asimov in 1941, in his novel I, Robot. He states the Three Laws of Robotics as,

“

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey any orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

”

The 3 laws of robotics determine the idea of safe interaction. The closer the human and the robot get the higher the risk of injury. In the industry this is solved by not letting human and robot share the workspace at any time by the extensive use of zones. The presence of human is completely forbidden in some part of space while the robot is working in it and vice versa.

With the advances of artificial intelligence, the autonomous robots could eventually have more proactive behaviours, planning their motion in complex unknown environments. These new capabilities would have to keeping safety as a primer issue and as second efficiency. To allow this new generation of robot, research is being made on human detection, motion planning, scene reconstruction, intelligent behaviour through task planning.

The basic goal of HRI is to define a general human model that could lead to principles and algorithms allowing more natural and effective interaction between humans and robots. Research ranges from how humans work with remote, tele-operated unmanned vehicles to peer-to-peer collaboration with anthropomorphic robots.

Many in the field of HRI study how humans collaborate and interact and use those studies to motivate how robots should interact with humans.

Towards Friendly human-robot interactions

File:Kismet robot 20051016.jpg

Kismet can produce a range of facial expressions.

Robots are artificial agents with capacities of perception and action in the physical world often referred by researchers as workspace. Their use has been generalized in factories but nowadays they tend to be found in the most technologically advanced societies in such critical domains as search and rescue, military battle, mine and bomb detection, scientific exploration, law enforcement, entertainment, and hospital care.

These new domains of applications imply a closer interaction with the user. The concept of closeness is to be taken in its full meaning, robots and humans share the workspace but also share goals in terms of task achievement. This close interaction needs new theoretical models, on one hand for the robotics scientists who work to improve the robots utility and on the other hand to evaluate the risks and benefits of this new "friend" for our modern society.

With the advance in AI, the research is focusing on one part towards the safest physical interaction. But also on a socially correct interaction, dependent on cultural criteria. The goal is to build an intuitive, and easy communication with the robot through speech, gestures, and facial expressions.

The robot has to adapt itself to our way of expressing desires and orders and not the contrary. But every day environments such as homes have much more complex social rules than those implied by factories or even military environments. Thus, the robot needs perceiving and understanding capacities to build dynamic models of its surroundings. It needs to categorize objects, recognize and locate humans and further their emotions. The need for dynamic capacities pushes forward every sub-field of robotics.

On the other end of HRI research the cognitive modelling of the "relationship" between human and the robots benefits the psychologists and robotic researchers the user study are often of interests on both sides. This research endeavours part of human society.

General HRI research

HRI research spans a wide range of field, some general to the nature of HRI.

Methods for perceiving humans

Most methods intend to build a 3D model through vision of the environment. The proprioception sensors permit the robot to have information over its own state. This information is relative to a reference.

Methods for perceiving humans in the environment are based on sensor information. An example of modern technique is to use colour information for example the fact that for light skinned people the hands are lighter than the clothes worn. A human modelled a priori is then fitted to the sensor information. The robot builds or has (depending on the level of autonomy the robot has) a 3D mapping of its surroundings to witch is assigned the humans locations.

A speech recognition system is used to interpret human desires or commands. By combining the information inferred by proprioception, sensor and speech the human position and state (standing, seated).

Methods for motion planning

Motion planning in dynamic environment is a challenge that is for the moment only achieved for 3 to 10 degrees of freedom robots. Humanoid robots or even 2 armed robots that can have up to 40 degrees of freedom are unsuited for dynamic environments with today's technology. However lower dimensional robots can use potential field method to compute trajectories avoiding collisions with human.

Cognitive models

A lot of data has been gathered with regards to user studies. For example, when users encounter proactive behaviour on the part of the robot and the robot does not respect a safety distance, penetrating the user space, he or she might express fear. This is dependent on one person to another. Only intensive experiment can permit a more precise model.

It has been shown that when a robot has no particular use, negative feelings are often expressed. The robot is perceived as useless and its presence becomes annoying.

In another experiment, it has occurred that people tend to attribute to the robot personality characteristics that were not implemented.

Application-oriented HRI research

In addition to general HRI research, researchers are currently exploring application areas for human-robot interaction systems. Application-oriented research is used to help bring current robotics technologies to bear against problems that exist in today's society. While human-robot interaction is still a rather young area of interest, there is active development and research in many areas.

Search and rescue

First responders face take great risks in search and rescue (SAR) settings, which typically involve environments that are unsafe for a human to travel. In addition, technology offers tools for observation that can greatly speed-up and improve the accuracy of human perception. Robots can be used to address these concerns . Research in this area includes efforts to address robot sensing, mobility, navigation, planning, integration, and tele-operated control.

SAR robots have already been deployed to environments such as the Collapse of the World Trade Center.

Other application areas include:

• Entertainment
• Education
• Field robotics
• Home and companion robotics
• Hospitality
• Rehabilitation and Elder Care

See also

Robotics

• Autonomous robots
• Gesture recognition
• Humanoid robots
• Human-robot collaboration
• Mobile robots
• Motion planning
• Robot simulations
• Robot teams
• Social robot

Technology

• Artificial intelligence
• Automatic speech recognition
• Computer supported collaborative work
• Dialog management
• Haptic technology
• Human-computer interaction
• Interactive Systems Engineering
• Linguistics
• fusion
• Telematics
• Face recognition

Psychology

• Anthropomorphism and the uncanny valley

Properties

Bartneck and Okada suggest that a robotic user interface can be described by the following four properties:

Tool - toy scale

• Is the system designed to solve a problem effectively or is it just for entertainment?

Remote control - autonomous scale

• Does the robot require remote control or is it capable of action without direct human influence?

Reactive - dialogue scale

• Does the robot rely on a fixed interaction pattern or is it able to have dialogue — exchange of information — with a human?

Anthropomorphism scale

• Does it have the shape or properties of a human?

Conferences

• The third International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships (HRPR 2010) was held in June 2010. Keynote speaker was Kerstin Dautenhahn.
• The second International Conference on Human-Robot Personal Relationships (HRPR 2009) was held in June 2009. Keynote speaker was Hiroshi Ishiguro.
• The IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication ( RO-MAN ) was founded in 1992 by Profs. Toshio Fukuda, Hisato Kobayashi, Hiroshi Harashima and Fumio Hara. Early workshop participants were mosly Japanese, and the first seven workshops were held in Japan. Since 1999, workshops have been held in Europe and the United States as well as Japan, and participation has been of international scope.
• The first ACM International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2006) was held in March 2006.
• The second ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2007) was held in March 2007.
• The third ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2008) was held in March 2008.
• The fourth ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2009) will be held in March 2009.

Related conferences

There are many conferences that are not exclusively HRI, but deal with broad aspects of HRI, and often have HRI papers presented.

• IEEE-RAS/RSJ International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids)
• Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp)
• IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
• Intelligent User Interfaces (IUI)
• Computer Human Interaction (CHI)
• American Association for Artificial Intelligence (AAAI)
• Interact

Related journals

There is no HRI Journal per se, but there are several more general journals in which one will find HRI articles.

• International Journal of Humanoid Robotics
• Interaction Studies Journal
• Artificial Intelligence
• Systems, Man and Cybernetics

External links

• Human interaction with the robot J2B2: Algorithms, graphics, and video material
• Carnegie Mellon University's People and Robots Research Group: Experimental and ethnographic studies of human-robot interaction
• Carnegie Mellon University's Human-Robot Interaction research group: Design and development of robotic systems for human use
• Bilge Mutlu's research on human-robot interaction: Design of social behavior, understanding the social impact of human-robot interaction
• NASA project on peer-to-peer human-robot interaction: Developing tools and methods for human-robot teamwork
• Takayuki Kanda's research on human-robot interaction: Experimental research on human-robot communication, field experiments, laboratory studies
• Institute of Robotics and Mechatronics Germany's national research centre for aeronautics and space
• CHRIS project Cooperative Human Robot Interaction Systems is a European project on HRI researchko:인간과 로봇 상호 작용

Casper, J.; Murphy, R. (June 2003). "Human-robot interactions during the robot-assisted urban search and rescue response at the World Trade Center" (PDF). IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics. 33 (3): 367–385. 

Bartneck, Christoph; Michio Okada (2001). "Robotic User Interfaces" (PDF). Proceedings of the Human and Computer Conference. pp. 130–140. http://bartneck.de/publications/2001/roboticUserInterfaces/bartneckHC2001.pdf.