Toward a Framework for a Human-Robot Interaction

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

Editorial: Cui Bono Robo Sapiens

Alois Knoll

Autonomous Robots, No.12, 2002

Summary

                  Since the 1920, when Karel Capek published “R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots”, man-made robot of human-like shape inspired people’s imagination, making robots viewed as humans partners, as friends or potential enemy. Reality so far has actually being very far from fiction and Robotics and AI are not yet at the point intended, technologies are not at a that point and therefore the vision of autonomous robots has shifted more at the basics, trying to obtain improvements in perception, communication and manipulation and integrating these characteristics in order to finally obtain a humanoid.

Originally the first humanoids are dated back in the 70’s with the “Wabots”, when in Waseda University (Japan), humanoids where build mainly with the intent of doing practical feasibility studies in mechanical engineering, at that time computing technology was not at the point of guaranteeing any kind of possible self-control or self-guidance. In the 80’s the research in humanoids slowed down due to the fact that no industrial application was found, today possible applications can be imagined easily in service, prosthetics, education, entertainment and so on. Of course humanoids open different fields of research which are related to the fact that it’s a matter of Cognitive Science, even studies of possible inter-humanoid relations appear to be interesting an challenging.

Different are the challenges in humanoids research, first of all the humanoids brain, which will be strictly dependent on its creator, the structure of it’s brain can be comparable with the one of human at birth.

Adult human brain operated in two different ways (Christaller ,. Al, 1999), fast parallel processing and slower sequent processing, not always it’s easy to fully distinguish the two and often repetitive sequent activities become fast parallel activities. Therefore a humanoid will have to reach this level of complexity in thought and action.

A next important step is the capacity of the humanoid of generating categories, attempts have been done in the field based on sensory stimuli, but still the subsequent step of self building a tailored non trivial reasoning has yet to be done. Also aspects which are usually considered as more achievable, such as planning and language, my not be that easy, for example there are studies which consider language genetically related (Chomsky).

Interaction with the humans of course is another important point which has to be kept into consideration, in fact also aspect as body-language are extremely important, specially in regard of “teaching by demonstration”, which still today hasn’t been achieved due to the fact that monomodal fixed cameras are mostly used, so there are no redundant multidimensional views available and the instruction is not in the form of a dialog between the instructor (human) and the robot. Better integration of certain class of actions must be obtained, such as vision, speech and touch, so that the concept of imitation would be more affordable, encompassing both motor and cognitive aspects.

Interaction with human covers also physical aspects, there is evidence of connection between human motor skill an cognitive development (Lakoff, 1990). Therefore there several aspects which have to be studies and analyzed: whole body cross and fine motion, body-centered behaviors and fine motion, learning arm motion, grasping and sensorimotor and posture stability, planning of movement and collision, locomotion and simulation of body limb dynamics for designer and as a mental tool for the humanoid.

Progress therefore is on the way and must be performed in the following three sectors: mechatronics, sensor design and evolutionary hardware.

The authors conclude discussing the future in humanoids’ research, asking for benchmarking and international competitions and contests (such as the “Robocup”), which would ensure improvements in the field. If a standard platform will be found, and for a reasonable price, then humanoid would enter in the sphere of interest of many people and investors, this will give a complete redesign of actuator and will require special power supply systems, where technologies can be taken easily from other sectors (such as the automotive one).

Key Concepts

Humanoids, Human Robot Interaction

Whose Job is it anyway? A Study of Human-Robot Interaction in a Collaborative Task

Pamela J. Hinds, Teresa L. Roberts, Hank Jones

Human-Computer Interaction, Volume 19, 2004

Summary

                  Human Robot cooperation is growing more and more and researches have supposed that humans may prefer working with human-like robots than machine-like, although, according to the authors, no test has been down up to the paper’s date (2004). The paper researches links with human likeness, status (subordinate, peer or supervisor) and dimensions. Today researches are divided mainly in two “team”, according to Brooks [2002], humanoids will have better communication chances than machine-like robots, while opponents believe that humanoid features may result in unrealistic expectations and in some cases even fear. In this research the case of underreliance is faced, being proved (Gawande, 2002) that people tend to resist technologies that are programmed to augment human decision making. Another aspect covered in this research is the level of responsibility that people assume for a certain task in certain conditions and with a certain robot cooperator.

The authors performed statistical test on 5 hypothesis: 1a) People rely on human-like robot partner more than a machine-like one; 1b) People will feel less responsible for the task when collaborating with a human like robot partner than a machine-like one; 2a) People will rely on the robot partner more when its characterized as a supervisor than when it is characterized as a subordinate; 2b) People will feel less responsible for a task when collaborating with a robot partner who is a supervisor than with a robot partner who is a subordinate or a peer; 3) People will feel the greatest amount of responsibility when collaborating with a machine-like robot subordinates as compared with machine-like robot subordinated. To test the tree hypothesis the researchers performed experiments to verify human likeness and status influence in human perception, the robot was operating in Wizard of Oz conditions (teleoperated) without the people performing been told.

The experiments have been performed with a the same robot, once wearing human-like features such as nose, ears, mouth and eyes been demonstrated (Di Salvo, Gemperle, Forlizzi and Kiesler, 2002) that there are the characteristics that most affect perception of human-likeness; the status has been previously communicated to the testers through written instruction (as been successfully done previously by Sande, 1986).

The experiment analyzed, through videotapes analysis, the attribution of credit and blame, specially using the concept of shared social identity analyzing the language used by the testers while working together with the robot.

Key Concepts

Human-Robot Cooperation, Team-working, Humanoids, Robot impact on humans

Key Results

The results have shown multiple aspects, first of all, not unexpected is the preference humans have in working with other humans rather than robots, but the difference regarding responsibility, attribution of blame and attribution of credit appears to be not statistically significant, as for the difference between human-like robot and machine-like robot. Hypothesis 1a and 1b appear therefore to be confirmed. It is interesting to notice how users tend communicated more with machine-like robots, since people perceive less common ground between themselves and the robot (Fussel & Krauss, 1992). Also it has been proved that people relied more on a peer robot than a subordinate or supervisor robot (when the robot is a supervisor then humans tend to blame the mistakes and attribute to themselves the success) and people feel much more responsible for the task when cooperating with a machine-like robot. This results suggests that the appearance of the robot is important according on the degree of responsibility required, when it’s needed to have more options then it would be better to have a machine-like robot (Robert et al., 1994), in the case of high hazardous environment and risk then humanoids may be a good choice so that people may delegate easily responsibilities to them.