50,421 research outputs found
Human Swarm Interaction: An Experimental Study of Two Types of Interaction with Foraging Swarms
In this paper we present the first study of human-swarm interaction comparing two fundamental types of interaction, coined intermittent and environmental. These types are exemplified by two control methods, selection and beacon control, made available to a human operator to control a foraging swarm of robots. Selection and beacon control differ with respect to their temporal and spatial influence on the swarm and enable an operator to generate different strategies from the basic behaviors of the swarm. Selection control requires an active selection of groups of robots while beacon control exerts an influence on nearby robots within a set range. Both control methods are implemented in a testbed in which operators solve an information foraging problem by utilizing a set of swarm behaviors. The robotic swarm has only local communication and sensing capabilities. The number of robots in the swarm range from 50 to 200. Operator performance for each control method is compared in a series of missions in different environments with no obstacles up to cluttered and structured obstacles. In addition, performance is compared to simple and advanced autonomous swarms. Thirty-two participants were recruited for participation in the study. Autonomous swarm algorithms were tested in repeated simulations. Our results showed that selection control scales better to larger swarms and generally outperforms beacon control. Operators utilized different swarm behaviors with different frequency across control methods, suggesting an adaptation to different strategies induced by choice of control method. Simple autonomous swarms outperformed human operators in open environments, but operators adapted better to complex environments with obstacles. Human controlled swarms fell short of task-specific benchmarks under all conditions. Our results reinforce the importance of understanding and choosing appropriate types of human-swarm interaction when designing swarm systems, in addition to choosing appropriate swarm behaviors
Symbol Emergence in Robotics: A Survey
Humans can learn the use of language through physical interaction with their
environment and semiotic communication with other people. It is very important
to obtain a computational understanding of how humans can form a symbol system
and obtain semiotic skills through their autonomous mental development.
Recently, many studies have been conducted on the construction of robotic
systems and machine-learning methods that can learn the use of language through
embodied multimodal interaction with their environment and other systems.
Understanding human social interactions and developing a robot that can
smoothly communicate with human users in the long term, requires an
understanding of the dynamics of symbol systems and is crucially important. The
embodied cognition and social interaction of participants gradually change a
symbol system in a constructive manner. In this paper, we introduce a field of
research called symbol emergence in robotics (SER). SER is a constructive
approach towards an emergent symbol system. The emergent symbol system is
socially self-organized through both semiotic communications and physical
interactions with autonomous cognitive developmental agents, i.e., humans and
developmental robots. Specifically, we describe some state-of-art research
topics concerning SER, e.g., multimodal categorization, word discovery, and a
double articulation analysis, that enable a robot to obtain words and their
embodied meanings from raw sensory--motor information, including visual
information, haptic information, auditory information, and acoustic speech
signals, in a totally unsupervised manner. Finally, we suggest future
directions of research in SER.Comment: submitted to Advanced Robotic
Spatial context-aware person-following for a domestic robot
Domestic robots are in the focus of research in
terms of service providers in households and even as robotic
companion that share the living space with humans. A major
capability of mobile domestic robots that is joint exploration
of space. One challenge to deal with this task is how could we
let the robots move in space in reasonable, socially acceptable
ways so that it will support interaction and communication
as a part of the joint exploration. As a step towards this
challenge, we have developed a context-aware following behav-
ior considering these social aspects and applied these together
with a multi-modal person-tracking method to switch between
three basic following approaches, namely direction-following,
path-following and parallel-following. These are derived from
the observation of human-human following schemes and are
activated depending on the current spatial context (e.g. free
space) and the relative position of the interacting human.
A combination of the elementary behaviors is performed in
real time with our mobile robot in different environments.
First experimental results are provided to demonstrate the
practicability of the proposed approach
Connectivity Differences between Human Operators of Swarms and Bandwidth Limitations
Human interaction with robot swarms (HSI) is a young field with very few user studies that explore operator behavior. All these studies assume perfect communication between the operator and the swarm. A key challenge in the use of swarm robotic systems in human supervised tasks is to understand human swarm interaction in the presence of limited communication bandwidth, which is a constraint arising in many practical scenarios. In this paper, we present results of human-subject experiments designed to study the effect of bandwidth limitations in human swarm interaction. We consider three levels of bandwidth availability in a swarm foraging task. The lowest bandwidth condition performs poorly, but the medium and high bandwidth condition both perform well. In the medium bandwidth condition, we display useful aggregated swarm information (like swarm centroid and spread) to compress the swarm state information. We also observe interesting operator behavior and adaptation of operators' swarm reaction
Choreographic and Somatic Approaches for the Development of Expressive Robotic Systems
As robotic systems are moved out of factory work cells into human-facing
environments questions of choreography become central to their design,
placement, and application. With a human viewer or counterpart present, a
system will automatically be interpreted within context, style of movement, and
form factor by human beings as animate elements of their environment. The
interpretation by this human counterpart is critical to the success of the
system's integration: knobs on the system need to make sense to a human
counterpart; an artificial agent should have a way of notifying a human
counterpart of a change in system state, possibly through motion profiles; and
the motion of a human counterpart may have important contextual clues for task
completion. Thus, professional choreographers, dance practitioners, and
movement analysts are critical to research in robotics. They have design
methods for movement that align with human audience perception, can identify
simplified features of movement for human-robot interaction goals, and have
detailed knowledge of the capacity of human movement. This article provides
approaches employed by one research lab, specific impacts on technical and
artistic projects within, and principles that may guide future such work. The
background section reports on choreography, somatic perspectives,
improvisation, the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, and robotics. From this
context methods including embodied exercises, writing prompts, and community
building activities have been developed to facilitate interdisciplinary
research. The results of this work is presented as an overview of a smattering
of projects in areas like high-level motion planning, software development for
rapid prototyping of movement, artistic output, and user studies that help
understand how people interpret movement. Finally, guiding principles for other
groups to adopt are posited.Comment: Under review at MDPI Arts Special Issue "The Machine as Artist (for
the 21st Century)"
http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts/special_issues/Machine_Artis
A Review of Verbal and Non-Verbal Human-Robot Interactive Communication
In this paper, an overview of human-robot interactive communication is
presented, covering verbal as well as non-verbal aspects of human-robot
interaction. Following a historical introduction, and motivation towards fluid
human-robot communication, ten desiderata are proposed, which provide an
organizational axis both of recent as well as of future research on human-robot
communication. Then, the ten desiderata are examined in detail, culminating to
a unifying discussion, and a forward-looking conclusion
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