Towards an Architecture for Semiautonomous Robot Telecontrol Systems.

The design and development of a computational system to support robot–operator collaboration is a challenging task, not only because of the overall system complexity, but furthermore because of the involvement of different technical and scientific disciplines, namely, Software Engineering, Psychology and Artificial Intelligence, among others. In our opinion the approach generally used to face this type of project is based on system architectures inherited from the development of autonomous robots and therefore fails to incorporate explicitly the role of the operator, i.e. these architectures lack a view that help the operator to see him/herself as an integral part of the system. The goal of this paper is to provide a human-centered paradigm that makes it possible to create this kind of view of the system architecture. This architectural description includes the definition of the role of operator and autonomous behaviour of the robot, it identifies the shared knowledge, and it helps the operator to see the robot as an intentional being as himself/herself

The design and evaluation of an interface and control system for a scariculated rehabilitation robot arm

This thesis is concerned with the design and development of a prototype implementation of a Rehabilitation Robotic manipulator based on a novel kinematic configuration. The initial aim of the research was to identify appropriate design criteria for the design of a user interface and control system, and for the subsequent evaluation of the manipulator prototype. This led to a review of the field of rehabilitation robotics, focusing on user evaluations of existing systems. The review showed that the design objectives of individual projects were often contradictory, and that a requirement existed for a more general and complete set of design criteria. These were identified through an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of existing systems, including an assessment of manipulator performances, commercial success and user feedback. The resulting criteria were used for the design and development of a novel interface and control system for the Middlesex Manipulator - the novel scariculated robotic system. A highly modular architecture was adopted, allowing the manipulator to provide a level of adaptability not approached by existing rehabilitation robotic systems. This allowed the interface to be configured to match the controlling ability and input device selections of individual users. A range of input devices was employed, offering variation in communication mode and bandwidth. These included a commercial voice recognition system, and a novel gesture recognition device. The later was designed using electrolytic tilt sensors, the outputs of which were encoded by artificial neural networks. These allowed for control of the manipulator through head or hand gestures. An individual with spinal-cord injury undertook a single-subject user evaluation of the Middlesex Manipulator over a period of four months. The evaluation provided evidence for the value of adaptability presented by the user interface. It was also shown that the prototype did not currently confonn to all the design criteria, but allowed for the identification of areas for design improvements. This work led to a second research objective, concerned with the problem of configuring an adaptable user interface for a specific individual. A novel form of task analysis is presented within the thesis, that allows the relative usability of interface configurations to be predicted based upon individual user and input device characteristics. An experiment was undertaken with 6 subjects performing 72 tasks runs with 2 interface configurations controlled by user gestures. Task completion times fell within the range predicted, where the range was generated using confidence intervals (α = 0.05) on point estimates of user and device characteristics. This allowed successful prediction over all task runs of the relative task completion times of interface configurations for a given user

Experimental user interface design toolkit for interaction research (IDTR).

The research reported and discussed in this thesis represents a novel approach to User Interface evaluation and optimisation through cognitive modelling. This is achieved through the development and testing of a toolkit or platform titled Toolkit for Optimisation of Interface System Evolution (TOISE). The research is conducted in two main phases. In phase 1, the Adaptive Control of Thought Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture is used to design Simulated Users (SU) models. This allows models of user interaction to be tested on a specific User Interface (UI). In phase 2, an evolutionary algorithm is added and used to evolve and test an optimised solution to User Interface layout based on the original interface design. The thesis presents a technical background, followed by an overview of some applications in their respective fields. The core concepts behind TOISE are introduced through a discussion of the Adaptive Control of Thought “ Rational (ACT-R) architecture with a focus on the ACT-R models that are used to simulate users. The notion of adding a Genetic Algorithm optimiser is introduced and discussed in terms of the feasibility of using simulated users as the basis for automated evaluation to optimise usability. The design and implementation of TOISE is presented and discussed followed by a series of experiments that evaluate the TOISE system. While the research had to address and solve a large number of technical problems the resulting system does demonstrate potential as a platform for automated evaluation and optimisation of user interface layouts. The limitations of the system and the approach are discussed and further work is presented. It is concluded that the research is novel and shows considerable promise in terms of feasibility and potential for optimising layout for enhanced usability

Viewfinder: final activity report

The VIEW-FINDER project (2006-2009) is an 'Advanced Robotics' project that seeks to apply a semi-autonomous robotic system to inspect ground safety in the event of a fire. Its primary aim is to gather data (visual and chemical) in order to assist rescue personnel. A base station combines the gathered information with information retrieved from off-site sources. The project addresses key issues related to map building and reconstruction, interfacing local command information with external sources, human-robot interfaces and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The VIEW-FINDER system is a semi-autonomous; the individual robot-sensors operate autonomously within the limits of the task assigned to them, that is, they will autonomously navigate through and inspect an area. Human operators monitor their operations and send high level task requests as well as low level commands through the interface to any nodes in the entire system. The human interface has to ensure the human supervisor and human interveners are provided a reduced but good and relevant overview of the ground and the robots and human rescue workers therein

Fast dynamic difficulty adjustment for intelligent tutoring systems with small datasets

This paper studies the problem of automatically adjusting the difficulty level of educational exercises to facilitate learning. Previous work on this topic either relies on large datasets or requires multiple interactions before it adjusts properly. Although this is sufficient for large-scale online courses, there are also scenarios where students are expected to only work through a few trials. In these cases, the adjustment needs to respond to only a few data points. To accommodate this, we propose a novel difficulty adjustment method that requires less data and adapts faster. Our proposed method refits an existing item response theory model to work on smaller datasets by generalizing based on attributes of the exercises. To adapt faster, we additionally introduce a discount value that weakens the influence of past interactions. We evaluate our proposed method on simulations and a user study using an example graph theory lecture. Our results show that our approach indeed succeeds in adjusting to learners quickly

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 376)

This bibliography lists 265 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during Jun. 1993. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and physiology, life support systems and man/system technology, protective clothing, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, planetary biology, and flight crew behavior and performance