Kolaboratif robotlarda güven özelliği: Sanal insan robot etkileşim ortamında, sözsüz ipuçlarının deneysel araştırması

This thesis reports the development of non-verbal HRI (Human-Robot Interaction) behaviors on a robotic manipulator, evaluating the role of trust in collaborative assembly tasks. Towards this end, we developed four non-verbal HRI behaviors, namely gazing, head nodding, tilting, and shaking, on a UR5 robotic manipulator. We used them under different degrees of trust of the user to the robot actions. Specifically, we used a certain head-on neck posture for the cobot using the last three links along with the gripper. The gaze behavior directed the gripper towards the desired point in space, alongside with the head nodding and shaking behaviors. We designed a remote setup to experiment subjects interacting with the cobot remotely via Zoom teleconferencing. In a simple collaborative scenario, the efficacy of these behaviors was assessed in terms of their impact on the formation of trust between the robot and the user and task performance. Nineteen people participated in the experiment with varying ages and genders.Bu tez insan robot arası etkileşimi geliştirmek amacıyla, yardımcı UR5 robotunun manipülatörü ile, bakış ve kafa davranışları yaratmayı ve etkilerini montaj senaryosu altında test etmeyi hedeflemektedir. Bu doğrultuda çeşitli sözlü olmayan robot davranışları UR5 robotu ve Robotiq çene kıskacı kullanılarak geliştirildi, bunlar; yana ve öne kafa sallama, kafa eğme ve bakış davranışıdır. Bu davranışları uygulayabilmek için daha önceden dizayn edilmiş bir robot duruşu kullanıldı ve son üç robot eklemi, çene kıskacı kullanılarak baş-boyun yapısına çevrildi. Bu duruş yapısı ile birlikte çene kıskacı uzayda bir noktaya doğrultularak bakış davranışı yapabilmektedir. Bakış davranışına ek olarak kafa yapısı ile birlikte kafa sallama gibi davranışlarda modellendi, bunun yanında katılımcıların aktif olarak cobot ile birlikte telekonferans programı olan Zoom üzerinden etkileşime geçebileceği özgün bir deney ortamı geliştirildi. Ortak çalışmaya dayalı bir senaryoda bu davranışların güven kazanımı ve performans üzerindeki etkisi test edildi. Farklı yaş ve cinsiyet gruplarından 19 katılımcı ile birlikte deneyler gerçekleştirildi.M.S. - Master of Scienc

Refined human-robot interaction through retro-projected robotic heads

We present an overview of the LightHead robot and its retro-projected face, followed by opportunities for this technology to push the state-of-the-art in HRI. Through comparison with existing robot head technologies, we show how retro-projected faces can provide a means to display human social-emotional behaviours including subtle social cues not achievable with other robotic heads

Blinking in Human Communicative Behaviour and it's Reproduction in Artificial Agents

A significant year-on-year rise in the creation and sales of personal and domestic robotic systems and the development of online embodied communicative agents (ECAs) has in parallel seen an increase in end-users from the public domain interacting with these systems. A number of these robotic/ECA systems are defined as social, whereby they are physically designed to resemble the bodily structure of a human and behaviorally designed to exist within human social surroundings. Their behavioural design is especially important with respect to communication as it is commonly stated that for any social robotic/ECA system to be truly useful within its role, it will need to be able to effectively communicate with its human users. Currently however, the act of a human user instructing a social robotic/ECA system to perform a task highlights many areas of contention in human communication understanding. Commonly, social robotic/ECA systems are embedded with either non-human-like communication interfaces or deficient imitative human communication interfaces, neither of which reach the levels of communicative interaction expected by human users, leading to communication difficulties which in turn create negative association with the social robotic/ECA system in its users. These communication issues lead to a strong requirement for the development of more effective imitative human communication behaviours within these systems. This thesis presents findings from our research into human non-verbal facial behaviour in communication. The objective of the work was to improve communication grounding between social robotic/ECA systems and their human users through the conceptual design of a computational system of human non-verbal facial behaviour (which in human-human communicative behaviour is shown to carry in the range of 55% of the intended semantic meaning of a transferred message) and the development of a highly accurate computational model of human blink behaviour and a computational model of physiological saccadic eye movement in human-human communication, enriching the human-like properties of the facial non-verbal communicative feedback expressed by the social robotic/ECA system. An enhanced level of interaction would likely be achieved, leading to increased empathic response from the user and an improved chance of a satisfactory communicative conclusion to a user’s task requirement instructions. The initial focus of the work was in the capture, transcription and analysis of common human non-verbal facial behavioural traits within human-human communication, linked to the expression of mental communicative states of understanding, uncertainty, misunderstanding and thought. Facial Non-Verbal behaviour data was collected and transcribed from twelve participants (six female) through a dialogue-based communicative interaction. A further focus was the analysis of blink co-occurrence with other traits of human-human communicative non-verbal facial behaviour and the capture of saccadic eye movement at common proxemic distances. From these data analysis tasks, the computational models of human blink behaviour and saccadic eye movement behaviour whilst listening / speaking within human-human communication were designed and then implemented within the LightHead social robotic system. Human-based studies on the perception of naïve users of the imitative probabilistic computational blink model performance on the LightHead robotic system are presented and the results discussed. The thesis concludes on the impact of the work along with suggestions for further studies towards the improvement of the important task of achieving seamless interactive communication between social robotic/ECA systems and their human users

The Design Of A Community-Informed Socially Interactive Humanoid Robot And End-Effectors For Novel Edge-Rolling

This dissertation discusses my work in building an HRI platform called Quori and my once separate now integrated work on a manipulation method that can enable robots like Quori, or any more capable robot, to move large circular cylindrical objects. Quori is a novel, affordable, socially interactive humanoid robot platform for facilitating non-contact human-robot interaction (HRI) research. The design of the system is motivated by feedback sampled from the HRI research community. The overall design maintains a balance of affordability and functionality. Ten Quori platforms have been awarded to a diverse group of researchers from across the United States to facilitate HRI research to build a community database from a common platform. This dissertation concludes with a demonstration of Quori transporting a large cylinder for which Quori does not have the power to lift nor the range of motion to dexterously manipulate. Quori is able to achieve this otherwise insurmountable task through a novel robotic manipulation technique called robotic edge-rolling. Edge-rolling refers to transporting a cylindrical object by rolling on its circular edge, as human workers maneuver a gas cylinder on the ground for example. This robotic edge-rolling is achieved by controlling the object to roll on the bottom edge in contact with the ground, and to slide on the surface of the robot\u27s end-effector. It can thus be regarded as a form of robotic dexterous, in-hand manipulation with nonprehensile grasps. This work mainly addresses the problem of grasp planning for edge-rolling by studying how to design appropriately shaped end-effectors with zero internal mobility and how to find feasible grasps for stably rolling the object with the simple end-effectors