2,754 research outputs found
Assistive robotics: research challenges and ethics education initiatives
Assistive robotics is a fast growing field aimed at helping healthcarers in hospitals, rehabilitation centers and nursery homes, as well as empowering people with reduced mobility at home, so that they can autonomously fulfill their daily living activities. The need to function in dynamic human-centered environments poses new research challenges: robotic assistants need to have friendly interfaces, be highly adaptable and customizable, very compliant and intrinsically safe to people, as well as able to handle deformable materials.
Besides technical challenges, assistive robotics raises also ethical defies, which have led to the emergence of a new discipline: Roboethics. Several institutions are developing regulations and standards, and many ethics education initiatives include contents on human-robot interaction and human dignity in assistive situations.
In this paper, the state of the art in assistive robotics is briefly reviewed, and educational materials from a university course on Ethics in Social Robotics and AI focusing on the assistive context are presented.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
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
Vision-Based Multi-Task Manipulation for Inexpensive Robots Using End-To-End Learning from Demonstration
We propose a technique for multi-task learning from demonstration that trains
the controller of a low-cost robotic arm to accomplish several complex picking
and placing tasks, as well as non-prehensile manipulation. The controller is a
recurrent neural network using raw images as input and generating robot arm
trajectories, with the parameters shared across the tasks. The controller also
combines VAE-GAN-based reconstruction with autoregressive multimodal action
prediction. Our results demonstrate that it is possible to learn complex
manipulation tasks, such as picking up a towel, wiping an object, and
depositing the towel to its previous position, entirely from raw images with
direct behavior cloning. We show that weight sharing and reconstruction-based
regularization substantially improve generalization and robustness, and
training on multiple tasks simultaneously increases the success rate on all
tasks
Classifying types of gesture and inferring intent
In order to infer intent from gesture, a rudimentary classification of types of gestures into five main classes is introduced. The classification is intended as a basis for incorporating the understanding of gesture into human-robot interaction (HRI). Some requirements for the operational classification of gesture by a robot interacting with humans are also suggested
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