Healthcare Robotics

Robots have the potential to be a game changer in healthcare: improving health and well-being, filling care gaps, supporting care givers, and aiding health care workers. However, before robots are able to be widely deployed, it is crucial that both the research and industrial communities work together to establish a strong evidence-base for healthcare robotics, and surmount likely adoption barriers. This article presents a broad contextualization of robots in healthcare by identifying key stakeholders, care settings, and tasks; reviewing recent advances in healthcare robotics; and outlining major challenges and opportunities to their adoption.Comment: 8 pages, Communications of the ACM, 201

How Should a Robot Approach a Pair of People?

This thesis experimentally investigates the comfort of pairs of seated people when they are approached by a robot from different directions. While the effect of robot approach direction on the comfort of a lone person has been investigated previously, the extension to a robot approaching pairs of people has not been explored rigorously. Three maximally-different seating configurations of paired people and eight different robot approach directions were considered. The experiment was augmented with a fourth seating configuration of a lone individual, allowing the responses of grouped and lone participants to be compared. Data obtained from the experiment were analysed using both linear and directional statistics. Results from 180 unique participants showed that the comfort of a person when a robot approached is influenced by the presence and location of a second person. Analysis of these data with directional statistics showed that participant comfort preference clusters into angular regions of ‘suitable for robot approach’ and ‘unsuitable for robot approach’. This finding shows the importance of avoiding robot approach directions of low comfort, rather than selecting a singular robot approach direction of high comfort. Rayleigh’s test of uniformity, a directional statistics method, also shows across all participant configurations that robot approach directions that minimize participant discomfort align spatially with regions that allow for good line of sight of the robot by both people, and are centred on the largest open space that a robot could approach the group from. Participants who were grouped also regarded the robot as having more social agency than did lone experimental participants. Grouped participants were less frustrated with the experimental task and also found it less physically and temporally demanding in comparison to lone experimental participants

In-home and remote use of robotic body surrogates by people with profound motor deficits

By controlling robots comparable to the human body, people with profound motor deficits could potentially perform a variety of physical tasks for themselves, improving their quality of life. The extent to which this is achievable has been unclear due to the lack of suitable interfaces by which to control robotic body surrogates and a dearth of studies involving substantial numbers of people with profound motor deficits. We developed a novel, web-based augmented reality interface that enables people with profound motor deficits to remotely control a PR2 mobile manipulator from Willow Garage, which is a human-scale, wheeled robot with two arms. We then conducted two studies to investigate the use of robotic body surrogates. In the first study, 15 novice users with profound motor deficits from across the United States controlled a PR2 in Atlanta, GA to perform a modified Action Research Arm Test (ARAT) and a simulated self-care task. Participants achieved clinically meaningful improvements on the ARAT and 12 of 15 participants (80%) successfully completed the simulated self-care task. Participants agreed that the robotic system was easy to use, was useful, and would provide a meaningful improvement in their lives. In the second study, one expert user with profound motor deficits had free use of a PR2 in his home for seven days. He performed a variety of self-care and household tasks, and also used the robot in novel ways. Taking both studies together, our results suggest that people with profound motor deficits can improve their quality of life using robotic body surrogates, and that they can gain benefit with only low-level robot autonomy and without invasive interfaces. However, methods to reduce the rate of errors and increase operational speed merit further investigation.Comment: 43 Pages, 13 Figure

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

Communication Free Robot Swarming

As the military use of unmanned aerial vehicles increases, a growing need for novel strategies to control these systems exists. One such method for controlling many unmanned aerial vehicles simultaneously is the through the use of swarm algorithms. This research explores a swarm robotic algorithm developed by Kadrovach implemented on Pioneer Robots in a real-world environment. An adaptation of his visual sensor is implemented using stereo vision as the primary method of sensing the environment. The swarm members are prohibited from explicitly communicating other than passively through the environment. The resulting implementation produces a communication free swarming algorithm. The algorithm is tested for performance of the visual sensor, performance of the algorithm against stationary targets, and finally, performance against dynamic targets. The results show expected behavior of the swarm model as implemented on the Pioneer robots providing a foundation for future research in swarm algorithms

Mean-Field-Type Games in Engineering

A mean-field-type game is a game in which the instantaneous payoffs and/or the state dynamics functions involve not only the state and the action profile but also the joint distributions of state-action pairs. This article presents some engineering applications of mean-field-type games including road traffic networks, multi-level building evacuation, millimeter wave wireless communications, distributed power networks, virus spread over networks, virtual machine resource management in cloud networks, synchronization of oscillators, energy-efficient buildings, online meeting and mobile crowdsensing.Comment: 84 pages, 24 figures, 183 references. to appear in AIMS 201

Blurring the Line Between Human and Machine: Marketing Artificial Intelligence

One of the most prominent and potentially transformative trends in society today is machines becoming more human-like, driven by progress in artificial intelligence. How this trend will impact individuals, private and public organizations, and society as a whole is still unknown, and depends largely on how individual consumers choose to adopt and use these technologies. This dissertation focuses on understanding how consumers perceive, adopt, and use technologies that blur the line between human and machine, with two primary goals. First, I build on psychological and philosophical theories of mind perception, anthropomorphism, and dehumanization, and on management research into technology adoption, in order to develop a theoretical understanding of the forces that shape consumer adoption of these technologies. Second, I develop practical marketing interventions that can be used to influence patterns of adoption according to the desired outcome. This dissertation is organized as follows. Essay 1 develops a conceptual framework for understanding what AI is, what it can do, and what are some of the key antecedents and consequences of its’ adoption. The subsequent two Essays test various parts of this framework. Essay 2 explores consumers’ willingness to use algorithms to perform tasks normally done by humans, focusing specifically on how the nature of the task for which algorithms are used and the human-likeness of the algorithm itself impact consumers’ use of the algorithm. Essay 3 focuses on the use of social robots in consumption contexts, specifically addressing the role of robots’ physical and mental human-likeness in shaping consumers’ comfort with and perceived usefulness of such robots. Together, these three Essays offer an empirically supported conceptual structure ¬for marketing researchers and practitioners to understand artificial intelligence and influence the processes through which consumers perceive and adopt it. Artificial intelligence has the potential to create enormous value for consumers, firms, and society, but also poses many profound challenges and risks. A better understanding of how this transformative technology is perceived and used can potentially help to maximize its potential value and minimize its risks