Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

HUMAN CENTERED ROBOTICS

EE-4.60 Dr Yiannis Demiris Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Imperial College London y.demiris@imperial.ac.uk http://www.iis.ee.ic.ac.uk/yiannis

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Introduction to Human Centered Robotics

There is no sense in being precise, when you dont even know what you are talking about! John von Neumann

Robots designed to act upon, or interact with, human beings

We will focus more on the interaction aspects, rather than situations where the human is a passive element to be acted upon.

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Aim & learning outcomes of the course

Aim: To teach students the design, control and evaluation theory underlying robotic systems capable of intelligent interaction with humans, and their application in industrial, medical, entertainment, and rehabilitation settings. Learning outcomes: Students will learn the theory underlying robotic systems that ! perceive human states using multimodal interfaces ! model and recognise human actions ! use adaptive shared control methods to assist humans in their task ! use learning algorithms to improve their performance through interaction with humans.
! Course philosophy: research-led teaching

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Administration
! 12-14 lectures - 100% coursework (group projects) ! Coursework - three items: ! Design paper (group) (20%) ! Component research paper (individual) (20%) ! Demonstration (end of term) + final research paper (group) first week of January ! Designing/building an actual interactive robot in groups ! Lots of research equipment (sensors, mobile robots, software libraries) from the Personal Robotics Research lab

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Anatomy of an interaction with robots

! Logistics ! How many agents are involved, human, robot, or otherwise. ! Does this set remain constant or does it change over the course of the interaction ! Purpose ! What are the tasks to be undertaken; What is the goal of the designer, or the participants in this interaction; ! Organisation ! Role of each agent in the interaction; how they interact (distance, modalities) ! Evaluation ! How are we going to judge the success of the interaction? ! Ethics ! The involvement of humans mandates that we consider ethical and legal issues early in the design process

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Logistics

(1)

Number of agents (human, robot) involved in the interaction

(Yanco and Drury 2004)

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Logistics (2)
! 1-to-1 interaction

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Logistics (2)
! 1-to-1 interaction (games for elderly)

Human Centered Robotics @ Imperial EEE

Logistics

(2)

Example 1: One human operator interacting with two robot manipulators

Microsurge surgical system, DLR

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Logistics

(3)

Example 2: Multiple human operators, multiple robots

M. Fernandes-Martins and Y. Demiris, Learning Multirobot Joint Action Plans from Simultaneous Task Execution Demonstrations, Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), pp. 931-938, Toronto, Canada, 2010.

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Purpose
! Interaction is a purposive activity ! Designer and participants of the interaction will have one or more

goals Examples:

! Increase of knowledge ! Robot learning by imitation ! Health maintenance improvement ! Robotics in elderly homes ! Autom, the weight loss robot ! Entertainment

! What are the tasks to be undertaken?

Intuitive Automatas Autom robot

! What are the expectations of the human users?

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Purpose
Industrial assistance
www.smerobot.org

Assisting SME (Small-to-medium enterprises) in the rapid deployment of robots

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Purpose
Eldercare

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Purpose
Entertainment

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Copleston & Bugmann (2008)

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Copleston & Bugmann (2008)

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Organisation (1)
! What is the structure of the team that is engaged in interaction? ! Physical factors involved in this interaction (e.g. distance)

Role of each participant in the interaction (Scholtz 2002, as modified by Goodrich & Schultz 2007); a human can be with respect to the robots:
! A supervisor (autonomous operation by the robots, human verifies) ! Operator (human responsible for each action of the robot) ! Mechanic ! Peer (human works alongside the robot, but not deciding its actions) ! Bystander (human in an observer role) ! Mentor: the robot is in a teaching or leadership role for the human ! Information Consumer: the human does not control the robot, but the

human uses information coming from the robot in, for example, a reconnaissance task.

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(2)

Goodrich & Schultz 2007

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Organisation (3)
On HRI distance: From skincare to teleoperation

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Evaluation(1)
Need to develop Metrics ! Methodologies for doing so not well developed ! Borrowing concepts from HCI, Human-Human collaboration

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Evaluation(2)

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Evaluation(3)
! Some domain-specific metrics are well developed, examples:
! USAR (Urban Search and Rescue) ! Time spent navigating, overhead, obstacle extraction, logistics ! Amount of space covered ! Positive outcomes Negative outcomes

NIST

USARsim

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Evaluation(4)
! Domain Independent metrics (Goodrich, Crandall, Oslen) ! Neglect tolerance: a measure of the effectiveness of the robots autonomy mode. How is the robots performance affected when neglected for a period of time? ! Interface efficiency: time it takes the human to gain Situational awareness; time to formulate a plan, time to translate that into commands, time to communicate that plan to the robot ! Tolerance of world complexity: how well does the interaction scheme scale to degrees of complexity in the world? ! Robot Attention Demand: average time spent servicing the robot/ divided by sum of average time spent servicing robot + neglect tolerance

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Evaluation(5)
Workload measures (e.g. NASA TLX (task load)) a subjective, multidimensional assessment tool that rates perceived workload on six different subscales: Mental Demand, Physical Demand, Temporal Demand, Performance, Effort, and Frustration. Developed by the Human Performance Group at NASA's Ames Research Center

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Ethics (1)
HRI by definition has human participants, necessitating the consideration of ethical issues from the beginning
! Collection, use and retention of data about humans ! Manipulation of human emotions ! Legal ramifications: The robot did it ; told me to do it ! Effect on human-human relations

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Ethics (2)
Eg: Robot Nannies
! Proposition: Creation of a robot to take care of children at home
! Example tasks: ! Teach them and check on their manners (e.g. postural information,

swearwords) ! Practice homework with them

! Benefits:
! Augment capabilities of busy parents in a changing society. ! Better than television!

! Issues:
! Pragmatism vs. idealism ! Deception design machines that pretend to care