Advances in Human-Robot Interaction

Rapid advances in the field of robotics have made it possible to use robots not just in industrial automation but also in entertainment, rehabilitation, and home service. Since robots will likely affect many aspects of human existence, fundamental questions of human-robot interaction must be formulated and, if at all possible, resolved. Some of these questions are addressed in this collection of papers by leading HRI researchers

Design and Experimental Evaluation of a Context-aware Social Gaze Control System for a Humanlike Robot

Nowadays, social robots are increasingly being developed for a variety of human-centered scenarios in which they interact with people. For this reason, they should possess the ability to perceive and interpret human non-verbal/verbal communicative cues, in a humanlike way. In addition, they should be able to autonomously identify the most important interactional target at the proper time by exploring the perceptual information, and exhibit a believable behavior accordingly. Employing a social robot with such capabilities has several positive outcomes for human society. This thesis presents a multilayer context-aware gaze control system that has been implemented as a part of a humanlike social robot. Using this system the robot is able to mimic the human perception, attention, and gaze behavior in a dynamic multiparty social interaction. The system enables the robot to direct appropriately its gaze at the right time to the environmental targets and humans who are interacting with each other and with the robot. For this reason, the attention mechanism of the gaze control system is based on features that have been proven to guide human attention: the verbal and non-verbal cues, proxemics, the effective field of view, the habituation effect, and the low-level visual features. The gaze control system uses skeleton tracking and speech recognition,facial expression recognition, and salience detection to implement the same features. As part of a pilot evaluation, the gaze behavior of 11 participants was collected with a professional eye-tracking device, while they were watching a video of two-person interactions. Analyzing the average gaze behavior of participants, the importance of human-relevant features in human attention triggering were determined. Based on this finding, the parameters of the gaze control system were tuned in order to imitate the human behavior in selecting features of environment. The comparison between the human gaze behavior and the gaze behavior of the developed system running on the same videos shows that the proposed approach is promising as it replicated human gaze behavior 89% of the time

Development of Human-Computer Interaction for Holographic AIs

Virtual humans and embodied conversational agents play diverse roles in real life, including game characters, chatbots, and teachers. In Augmented Reality (AR), such agents are capable of interacting with the real world. To distinguish between both types of virtual agents, AR agents were conceptually redefined as "holographic Artificial Intelligences (AIs)". Holographic AIs are embodied virtual agents interacting with real objects in Augmented Reality (AR), and can respond to events both in virtual and real environments. This thesis provides a comprehensive investigation into holographic AIs, spanning from their design to their user experience. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate the creation and use of holographic AIs, by creating specific holographic AIs, and then examining how users perceive such entities in order to contribute to the improvement of the user experience. As a result, this thesis explores the design space for and methods for creating holographic AIs, proposing the novel PICS model which include the dimensions of persona, intelligence, conviviality, and senses. Following the PICS model, a set of holographic AIs are designed by using a method of semi-automatic reconstruction. An AI that resembles a human being in appearance and behaviour is endowed with multimodal interactions capable of creating the illusion of physicality. The initial proposed model is then refined based on the experience of creation. Basic body language gestures, such as nodding and opening the arms, are insufficient to engage users, particularly when it comes to intelligent tutoring systems. Therefore, this thesis specifically focuses on an open problem, the generation of re-usable standard instructional gestures. In an experiment, key instructional movements that can be employed by holographic AIs were identified and extracted as animations. The hitherto known range of representational gestures is, epistemologically, further expanded by transformational and imitation gestures, which show how humans manipulate spatio-motor information and characterise posture using hand motion. Therefore, the model can be extended to describe the holographic AI’s behaviour. Moreover, in order to assess the empirical validity of holographic AIs, this research explores learners' trustworthiness towards this novel technology - as a key criterion for efficacy of this AI approach. Trust and trustworthiness, in terms of holographic AIs, refers to a mindset that aids users in achieving objectives based on good intentions. Young learners’ perception of trust is largely influenced by affective aspects of trust, determined by how emotionally responsive a holographic AI is. These findings contribute to the design of personal holographic AIs that can perform a series of meaningful gestures that engage the learner’s attention for learning, which in turn fosters a reliable and trustworthy relationship. Both experiments are able to extend elements by adding gestures and holistic perception to this model

A Wearable communications device

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a concept for a wearable communications device. Proposed for the market of ten years into the future, this device will integrate today\u27s multiple communications devices and be capable of wireless global communications

To Affinity and Beyond: Interactive Digital Humans as a Human Computer Interface

The field of human computer interaction is increasingly exploring the use of more natural, human-like user interfaces to build intelligent agents to aid in everyday life. This is coupled with a move to people using ever more realistic avatars to represent themselves in their digital lives. As the ability to produce emotionally engaging digital human representations is only just now becoming technically possible, there is little research into how to approach such tasks. This is due to both technical complexity and operational implementation cost. This is now changing as we are at a nexus point with new approaches, faster graphics processing and enabling new technologies in machine learning and computer vision becoming available. I articulate the issues required for such digital humans to be considered successfully located on the other side of the phenomenon known as the Uncanny Valley. My results show that a complex mix of perceived and contextual aspects affect the sense making on digital humans and highlights previously undocumented effects of interactivity on the affinity. Users are willing to accept digital humans as a new form of user interface and they react to them emotionally in previously unanticipated ways. My research shows that it is possible to build an effective interactive digital human that crosses the Uncanny Valley. I directly explore what is required to build a visually realistic digital human as a primary research question and I explore if such a realistic face provides sufficient benefit to justify the challenges involved in building it. I conducted a Delphi study to inform the research approaches and then produced a complex digital human character based on these insights. This interactive and realistic digital human avatar represents a major technical undertaking involving multiple teams around the world. Finally, I explored a framework for examining the ethical implications and signpost future research areas

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

Сборник текстов по чтению на английском языке для студентов специальности 1-40 03 01 Искусственный интеллект

Venskovich Mikhail Stanislavovich; Shpudeiko Lyudmila Nikolaevna; Kisten Natalya Vasilievna. Artificial intelligence. Collection of texts on reading in English for students of the specialty 1-40 03 01 Artificial intelligenceСборник текстов по чтению на английском языке предназначается, прежде всего, для студентов специальности 1 – 40 03 01 Искусственный интеллект, но может использоваться и студентами, изучающими вычислительные машины, системы, комплексы и сети. Цель пособия – совершенствование навыков чтения и понимания аутентичной научно-технической литературы по изучаемой специальности, развитие навыков перевода

Artificial general intelligence: Proceedings of the Second Conference on Artificial General Intelligence, AGI 2009, Arlington, Virginia, USA, March 6-9, 2009

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) research focuses on the original and ultimate goal of AI – to create broad human-like and transhuman intelligence, by exploring all available paths, including theoretical and experimental computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, and innovative interdisciplinary methodologies. Due to the difficulty of this task, for the last few decades the majority of AI researchers have focused on what has been called narrow AI – the production of AI systems displaying intelligence regarding specific, highly constrained tasks. In recent years, however, more and more researchers have recognized the necessity – and feasibility – of returning to the original goals of the field. Increasingly, there is a call for a transition back to confronting the more difficult issues of human level intelligence and more broadly artificial general intelligence