Human Aware Navigation for Assistive Robotics

The original publication is available at www.springerlink.comInternational audienceEnsuring proper living conditions for an ever growing number of elderly people is a significative challenge for many countries. The difficulty and cost of hiring and training specialized personnel has fostered research in assistive robotics as a viable alternative. In this context, an ideally suited and very relevant application is to transport people with reduced mobility. This may involve either autonomous or semi-autonomous transportation devices such as cars and wheelchairs. For a working solution, a number of problems including safety, usability and economic feasibility have to be solved. This paper presents PAL's robotic wheelchair, an experimental platform to study and provide solutions to many of the aforementioned problems

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

Role Playing Learning for Socially Concomitant Mobile Robot Navigation

In this paper, we present the Role Playing Learning (RPL) scheme for a mobile robot to navigate socially with its human companion in populated environments. Neural networks (NN) are constructed to parameterize a stochastic policy that directly maps sensory data collected by the robot to its velocity outputs, while respecting a set of social norms. An efficient simulative learning environment is built with maps and pedestrians trajectories collected from a number of real-world crowd data sets. In each learning iteration, a robot equipped with the NN policy is created virtually in the learning environment to play itself as a companied pedestrian and navigate towards a goal in a socially concomitant manner. Thus, we call this process Role Playing Learning, which is formulated under a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. The NN policy is optimized end-to-end using Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with consideration of the imperfectness of robot's sensor measurements. Simulative and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our method

Methodology and themes of human-robot interaction: a growing research field

Original article can be found at: http://www.intechweb.org/journal.php?id=3 Distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. Users are free to read, print, download and use the content or part of it so long as the original author(s) and source are correctly credited.This article discusses challenges of Human-Robot Interaction, which is a highly inter- and multidisciplinary area. Themes that are important in current research in this lively and growing field are identified and selected work relevant to these themes is discussed.Peer reviewe

Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots : Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues

Maha Salem, Gabriella Lakatos, Farshid Amirabdollahian, K. Dautenhahn, ‘Towards Safe and Trustworthy Social Robots: Ethical Challenges and Practical Issues’, paper presented at the 7th International Conference on Social Robotics, Paris, France, 26-30 October, 2015.As robots are increasingly developed to assist humans so- cially with everyday tasks in home and healthcare settings, questions regarding the robot's safety and trustworthiness need to be addressed. The present work investigates the practical and ethical challenges in de- signing and evaluating social robots that aim to be perceived as safe and can win their human users' trust. With particular focus on collaborative scenarios in which humans are required to accept information provided by the robot and follow its suggestions, trust plays a crucial role and is strongly linked to persuasiveness. Accordingly, human-robot trust can directly aect people's willingness to cooperate with the robot, while under- or overreliance may have severe or even dangerous consequences. Problematically, investigating trust and human perceptions of safety in HRI experiments proves challenging in light of numerous ethical con- cerns and risks, which this paper aims to highlight and discuss based on experiences from HRI practice.Peer reviewe

Social Roles and Baseline Proxemic Preferences for a Domestic Service Robot

© The Author(s) 2014. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited. The work described in this paper was conducted within the EU Integrated Projects LIREC (LIving with Robots and intEractive Companions, funded by the European Commission under contract numbers FP7 215554, and partly funded by the ACCOMPANY project, a part of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement n287624The goal of our research is to develop socially acceptable behavior for domestic robots in a setting where a user and the robot are sharing the same physical space and interact with each other in close proximity. Specifically, our research focuses on approach distances and directions in the context of a robot handing over an object to a userPeer reviewe