16,790 research outputs found
Explorations in engagement for humans and robots
This paper explores the concept of engagement, the process by which
individuals in an interaction start, maintain and end their perceived
connection to one another. The paper reports on one aspect of engagement among
human interactors--the effect of tracking faces during an interaction. It also
describes the architecture of a robot that can participate in conversational,
collaborative interactions with engagement gestures. Finally, the paper reports
on findings of experiments with human participants who interacted with a robot
when it either performed or did not perform engagement gestures. Results of the
human-robot studies indicate that people become engaged with robots: they
direct their attention to the robot more often in interactions where engagement
gestures are present, and they find interactions more appropriate when
engagement gestures are present than when they are not.Comment: 31 pages, 5 figures, 3 table
Personalization framework for adaptive robotic feeding assistance
The final publication is available at link.springer.comThe deployment of robots at home must involve robots with pre-defined skills and the capability of
personalizing their behavior by non-expert users. A framework to tackle this personalization is presented and applied
to an automatic feeding task. The personalization involves the caregiver providing several examples of feeding using
Learning-by- Demostration, and a ProMP formalism to compute an overall trajectory and the variance along the path.
Experiments show the validity of the approach in generating different feeding motions to adapt to user’s preferences,
automatically extracting the relevant task parameters. The importance of the nature of the demonstrations is also
assessed, and two training strategies are compared. © Springer International Publishing AG 2016.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Towards the Safety of Human-in-the-Loop Robotics: Challenges and Opportunities for Safety Assurance of Robotic Co-Workers
The success of the human-robot co-worker team in a flexible manufacturing
environment where robots learn from demonstration heavily relies on the correct
and safe operation of the robot. How this can be achieved is a challenge that
requires addressing both technical as well as human-centric research questions.
In this paper we discuss the state of the art in safety assurance, existing as
well as emerging standards in this area, and the need for new approaches to
safety assurance in the context of learning machines. We then focus on robotic
learning from demonstration, the challenges these techniques pose to safety
assurance and indicate opportunities to integrate safety considerations into
algorithms "by design". Finally, from a human-centric perspective, we stipulate
that, to achieve high levels of safety and ultimately trust, the robotic
co-worker must meet the innate expectations of the humans it works with. It is
our aim to stimulate a discussion focused on the safety aspects of
human-in-the-loop robotics, and to foster multidisciplinary collaboration to
address the research challenges identified
Teaching humanoid robotics by means of human teleoperation through RGB-D sensors
This paper presents a graduate course project on humanoid robotics offered by the University of Padova. The target is to safely lift an object by teleoperating a small humanoid. Students have to map human limbs into robot joints, guarantee the robot stability during the motion, and teleoperate the robot to perform the correct movement. We introduce the following innovative aspects with respect to classical robotic classes: i) the use of humanoid robots as teaching tools; ii) the simplification of the stable locomotion problem by exploiting the potential of teleoperation; iii) the adoption of a Project-Based Learning constructivist approach as teaching methodology. The learning objectives of both course and project are introduced and compared with the students\u2019 background. Design and constraints students have to deal with are reported, together with the amount of time they and their instructors dedicated to solve tasks. A set of evaluation results are provided in order to validate the authors\u2019 purpose, including the students\u2019 personal feedback. A discussion about possible future improvements is reported, hoping to encourage further spread of educational robotics in schools at all levels
A Parallel Distributed Strategy for Arraying a Scattered Robot Swarm
We consider the problem of organizing a scattered group of robots in
two-dimensional space, with geometric maximum distance between robots. The
communication graph of the swarm is connected, but there is no central
authority for organizing it. We want to arrange them into a sorted and
equally-spaced array between the robots with lowest and highest label, while
maintaining a connected communication network.
In this paper, we describe a distributed method to accomplish these goals,
without using central control, while also keeping time, travel distance and
communication cost at a minimum. We proceed in a number of stages (leader
election, initial path construction, subtree contraction, geometric
straightening, and distributed sorting), none of which requires a central
authority, but still accomplishes best possible parallelization. The overall
arraying is performed in time, individual messages, and
travel distance. Implementation of the sorting and navigation use communication
messages of fixed size, and are a practical solution for large populations of
low-cost robots
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