5,575 research outputs found

    Challenges in Collaborative HRI for Remote Robot Teams

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    Collaboration between human supervisors and remote teams of robots is highly challenging, particularly in high-stakes, distant, hazardous locations, such as off-shore energy platforms. In order for these teams of robots to truly be beneficial, they need to be trusted to operate autonomously, performing tasks such as inspection and emergency response, thus reducing the number of personnel placed in harm's way. As remote robots are generally trusted less than robots in close-proximity, we present a solution to instil trust in the operator through a `mediator robot' that can exhibit social skills, alongside sophisticated visualisation techniques. In this position paper, we present general challenges and then take a closer look at one challenge in particular, discussing an initial study, which investigates the relationship between the level of control the supervisor hands over to the mediator robot and how this affects their trust. We show that the supervisor is more likely to have higher trust overall if their initial experience involves handing over control of the emergency situation to the robotic assistant. We discuss this result, here, as well as other challenges and interaction techniques for human-robot collaboration.Comment: 9 pages. Peer reviewed position paper accepted in the CHI 2019 Workshop: The Challenges of Working on Social Robots that Collaborate with People (SIRCHI2019), ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, May 2019, Glasgow, U

    A Communication Interface for Multilayer Cloud Computing Architecture for Low Cost Underwater Vehicles

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    To enable high computational loads for low cost underwater drones, a cloud based architecture is proposed to take advantage of recent development in machine learning and computer vision. The processing power made available will benefit vehicles with limited onboard processing capacity. The rapid development of cloud computing services have made servers with significant computational resources easier to access. In this paper, a communication interface for cloud based multilayer architecture is proposed to enable real time performance by distributing the workload to networked processing devices. It adopts a publish-subscribe model for efficient communication between the layers. The latency and workload distribution are evaluated to assess the efficiency of the proposed method. An application to semantic segmentation of under-water scenes is also tested to measure the framework capabilities for real-time operation using more resource-demanding tools. The conducted experiments resulted in time and performance gains through offloading the underwater vehicle, and forwarding the computations to the cloud based layer

    Adaptable underwater networks: The relation between autonomy and communications

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    This paper discusses requirements for autonomy and communications in maritime environments through two use cases which are sourced from military scenarios: Mine Counter Measures (MCM) and Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW). To address these requirements, this work proposes a service-oriented architecture that breaks the typical boundaries between the autonomy and the communications stacks. An initial version of the architecture has been implemented and its deployment during a field trial done in January 2019 is reported. The paper discusses the achieved results in terms of system flexibility and ability to address the MCM and ASW requirements

    Teams organization and performance analysis in autonomous human-robot teams

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    This paper proposes a theory of human control of robot teams based on considering how people coordinate across different task allocations. Our current work focuses on domains such as foraging in which robots perform largely independent tasks. The present study addresses the interaction between automation and organization of human teams in controlling large robot teams performing an Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) task. We identify three subtasks: perceptual search-visual search for victims, assistance-teleoperation to assist robot, and navigation-path planning and coordination. For the studies reported here, navigation was selected for automation because it involves weak dependencies among robots making it more complex and because it was shown in an earlier experiment to be the most difficult. This paper reports an extended analysis of the two conditions from a larger four condition study. In these two "shared pool" conditions Twenty four simulated robots were controlled by teams of 2 participants. Sixty paid participants (30 teams) were recruited to perform the shared pool tasks in which participants shared control of the 24 UGVs and viewed the same screens. Groups in the manual control condition issued waypoints to navigate their robots. In the autonomy condition robots generated their own waypoints using distributed path planning. We identify three self-organizing team strategies in the shared pool condition: joint control operators share full authority over robots, mixed control in which one operator takes primary control while the other acts as an assistant, and split control in which operators divide the robots with each controlling a sub-team. Automating path planning improved system performance. Effects of team organization favored operator teams who shared authority for the pool of robots. © 2010 ACM

    Advances in integrating autonomy with acoustic communications for intelligent networks of marine robots

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    Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution February 2013Autonomous marine vehicles are increasingly used in clusters for an array of oceanographic tasks. The effectiveness of this collaboration is often limited by communications: throughput, latency, and ease of reconfiguration. This thesis argues that improved communication on intelligent marine robotic agents can be gained from acting on knowledge gained by improved awareness of the physical acoustic link and higher network layers by the AUV’s decision making software. This thesis presents a modular acoustic networking framework, realized through a C++ library called goby-acomms, to provide collaborating underwater vehicles with an efficient short-range single-hop network. goby-acomms is comprised of four components that provide: 1) losslessly compressed encoding of short messages; 2) a set of message queues that dynamically prioritize messages based both on overall importance and time sensitivity; 3) Time Division Multiple Access (TDMA) Medium Access Control (MAC) with automatic discovery; and 4) an abstract acoustic modem driver. Building on this networking framework, two approaches that use the vehicle’s “intelligence” to improve communications are presented. The first is a “non-disruptive” approach which is a novel technique for using state observers in conjunction with an entropy source encoder to enable highly compressed telemetry of autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) position vectors. This system was analyzed on experimental data and implemented on a fielded vehicle. Using an adaptive probability distribution in combination with either of two state observer models, greater than 90% compression, relative to a 32-bit integer baseline, was achieved. The second approach is “disruptive,” as it changes the vehicle’s course to effect an improvement in the communications channel. A hybrid data- and model-based autonomous environmental adaptation framework is presented which allows autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) with acoustic sensors to follow a path which optimizes their ability to maintain connectivity with an acoustic contact for optimal sensing or communication.I wish to acknowledge the sponsors of this research for their generous support of my tuition, stipend, and research: the WHOI/MIT Joint Program, the MIT Presidential Fellowship, the Office of Naval Research (ONR) # N00014-08-1-0011, # N00014-08-1-0013, and the ONR PlusNet Program Graduate Fellowship, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) (Deep Sea Operations: Applied Physical Sciences (APS) Award # APS 11-15 3352-006, APS 11-15-3352-215 ST 2.6 and 2.7

    The ARROWS project: Adapting and developing robotics technologies for underwater archaeology

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    ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas (ARROWS) EU Project proposes to adapt and develop low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. ARROWS methodology is to identify the archaeologists requirements in all phases of the campaign and to propose related technological solutions. Starting from the necessities identified by archaeological project partners in collaboration with the Archaeology Advisory Group, a board composed of European archaeologists from outside ARROWS, the aim is the development of a heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs capable of comply with a complete archaeological autonomous mission. Three new different AUVs have been designed in the framework of the project according to the archaeologists' indications: MARTA, characterized by a strong hardware modularity for ease of payload and propulsion systems configuration change; U-C AT, a turtle inspired bio-mimetic robot devoted to shipwreck penetration and A-Size AUV, a vehicle of small dimensions and weight easily deployable even by a single person. These three vehicles will cooperate within the project with AUVs already owned by ARROWS partners exploiting a distributed high-level control software based on the World Model Service (WMS), a storage system for the environment knowledge, updated in real-time through online payload data process, in the form of an ontology. The project includes also the development of a cleaning tool for well-known artifacts maintenance operations. The paper presents the current stage of the project that will lead to overall system final demonstrations, during Summer 2015, in two different scenarios, Sicily (Italy) and Baltic Sea (Estonia

    Interoperability Among Unmanned Maritime Vehicles: Review and First In-field Experimentation

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    Complex maritime missions, both above and below the surface, have traditionally been carried out by manned surface ships and submarines equipped with advanced sensor systems. Unmanned Maritime Vehicles (UMVs) are increasingly demonstrating their potential for improving existing naval capabilities due to their rapid deployability, easy scalability, and high reconfigurability, offering a reduction in both operational time and cost. In addition, they mitigate the risk to personnel by leaving the man far-from-the-risk but in-the-loop of decision making. In the long-term, a clear interoperability framework between unmanned systems, human operators, and legacy platforms will be crucial for effective joint operations planning and execution. However, the present multi-vendor multi-protocol solutions in multi-domain UMVs activities are hard to interoperate without common mission control interfaces and communication protocol schemes. Furthermore, the underwater domain presents significant challenges that cannot be satisfied with the solutions developed for terrestrial networks. In this paper, the interoperability topic is discussed blending a review of the technological growth from 2000 onwards with recent authors' in-field experience; finally, important research directions for the future are given. Within the broad framework of interoperability in general, the paper focuses on the aspect of interoperability among UMVs not neglecting the role of the human operator in the loop. The picture emerging from the review demonstrates that interoperability is currently receiving a high level of attention with a great and diverse deal of effort. Besides, the manuscript describes the experience from a sea trial exercise, where interoperability has been demonstrated by integrating heterogeneous autonomous UMVs into the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE) network, using different robotic middlewares and acoustic modem technologies to implement a multistatic active sonar system. A perspective for the interoperability in marine robotics missions emerges in the paper, through a discussion of current capabilities, in-field experience and future advanced technologies unique to UMVs. Nonetheless, their application spread is slowed down by the lack of human confidence. In fact, an interoperable system-of-systems of autonomous UMVs will require operators involved only at a supervisory level. As trust develops, endorsed by stable and mature interoperability, human monitoring will be diminished to exploit the tremendous potential of fully autonomous UMVs
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