Sebastian
Thrun
Human-Computer
Interaction, No.19, 2004
Summary
The field of
robotics has undergone a considerable change from the time it first appeared as
a complete science, robots now perform many assembly and transportation tasks,
often equipped with minimal sensing and computing, slaved to perform a
repetitive task. The future is more and more seeing the introduction of service
robots and this is mainly thanks to reduce in costs of many technologies
required and increase in autonomy capabilities.
Robotics appears to be a broad discipline and therefore definitions of
this science are not unique, a general definition has been done by the author
in a previous paper (Thrun, 2002) a system of robotic sensors, actuators and
algorithms. The United Nations has categorized robotics in three fields:
industrial robotics, professional service robotics and personal service
robotics.
Industrial robotics are the earliest commercial success; an industrial
robot operates manipulating its physical environment, it is computer controlled
and operates in industrial settings (for example on conveyor belts).
Industrial robotics started in the 60s with the first commercial
manipulator, the Unimate, later on in
the 70s Nissan Corporation automated an entire assembly line with robots,
starting a real “robotic revolution”, simply it can be considered that today
the ration human to worker to robots is approximately 10:1 (the automotive
industry is definitely the one with biggest application of robotics). However
industrial robots are not intended to operate directly with humans.
Professional service robots are the younger kind of robots and are
projected to assist people, perhaps in accessible environments or in tasks
where speed and precision won’t definitely be met by human operators (as it is
becoming more common in surgery).
Personal service robots posses today the highest expected growth rate,
they are projected to assist people in domestic tasks and for recreational
activities, often these robots are humanoids.
In all three of these fields two are the main drivers: cost and safety,
these appear to be the challenges of robotics.
Autonomy refers to the ability the robot has to accommodate variation in
the environment, it is a very important factory in human-robot interaction.
Industrial robots are not considered to be highly autonomous, they often are
called for repetitive tasks and therefore can be programmed, a different
scenario appears to be the on of service robots where complexity of the
environment brings them to be design to be very autonomous since they have to
be able to predict the environment uncertainties, to detect and accommodate
people and so on.
Of course there is also a cost issue, which necessitates the personal
robots to be low-cost, therefore it they are the most complicated since the
need high levels of autonomy and low costs. In human robot interaction
extremely important become the interface mechanism, industrial robots are often
limited, in fact they hard programmed and programming language and simulation
softwares appear to be intermediary between the robot and the human. Service
robots of course require richer interfaces and therefore distinguished are
indirect and direct interaction methods. Indirect interaction consists of a
person operating a robot through a command, while direct interaction consist of
a robot taking decision on its on in parallel with a human.
Different technologies exist in order to achieve different method of
communication, an interesting example appears to be the Robonaus (Ambrose et al., 2001), a master-slave idea demonstrating
how a robot can cooperate with astronaut on a space station. Speech
synthetisers and screens also appear to be interesting direct interaction methods.
Investigating humanoids and appearance, together with social aspect of
service robots are also important aspect which researched are today
investigating for the future of robotics.
Key Concepts
Human Robot Interaction, Human Robot Cooperation
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