1,290 research outputs found
Synthesis about a collaborative project on “Technology Assessment of Autonomous Systems”
The project started in 2009 with the support of DAAD in Germany and CRUP in Portugal under the “Collaborative German-Portuguese University Actions” programme. One central goal is the further development of a theory of technology assessment applied to robotics and autonomous systems in general that reflects in its methodology the changing conditions of knowledge production in modern societies and the emergence of new robotic technologies and of associated disruptive changes. Relevant topics here are handling broadened future horizons and new clusters of science and technology (medicine, engineering, interfaces, industrial automation, micro-devices, security and safety), as well as new governance structures in policy decision making concerning research and development (R&D).Robotic systems, Autonomous systems, Technology assessment, Germany, Portugal
The perception of emotion in artificial agents
Given recent technological developments in robotics, artificial intelligence and virtual reality, it is perhaps unsurprising that the arrival of emotionally expressive and reactive artificial agents is imminent. However, if such agents are to become integrated into our social milieu, it is imperative to establish an understanding of whether and how humans perceive emotion in artificial agents. In this review, we incorporate recent findings from social robotics, virtual reality, psychology, and neuroscience to examine how people recognize and respond to emotions displayed by artificial agents. First, we review how people perceive emotions expressed by an artificial agent, such as facial and bodily expressions and vocal tone. Second, we evaluate the similarities and differences in the consequences of perceived emotions in artificial compared to human agents. Besides accurately recognizing the emotional state of an artificial agent, it is critical to understand how humans respond to those emotions. Does interacting with an angry robot induce the same responses in people as interacting with an angry person? Similarly, does watching a robot rejoice when it wins a game elicit similar feelings of elation in the human observer? Here we provide an overview of the current state of emotion expression and perception in social robotics, as well as a clear articulation of the challenges and guiding principles to be addressed as we move ever closer to truly emotional artificial agents
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
Robots that look like humans : a brief look into humanoid robotics
This article provides a brief overview of the technology of humanoid robots. First, historical development and hardware progress are presented mainly on human-size full-body biped humanoid robots, together with progress in pattern generation of biped locomotion. Then, «whole-body motion» ? coordinating leg and arm movements to fully leverage humanoids? high degrees of freedom ? is presented, followed by its applications in fields such as device evaluation and large-scale assembly. Upper-body humanoids with a mobile base, which are mainly utilized for research on human-robot interaction and cognitive robotics, are also introduced before addressing current issues and perspectives
MILD: Multimodal Interactive Latent Dynamics for Learning Human-Robot Interaction
Modeling interaction dynamics to generate robot trajectories that enable a
robot to adapt and react to a human's actions and intentions is critical for
efficient and effective collaborative Human-Robot Interactions (HRI). Learning
from Demonstration (LfD) methods from Human-Human Interactions (HHI) have shown
promising results, especially when coupled with representation learning
techniques. However, such methods for learning HRI either do not scale well to
high dimensional data or cannot accurately adapt to changing via-poses of the
interacting partner. We propose Multimodal Interactive Latent Dynamics (MILD),
a method that couples deep representation learning and probabilistic machine
learning to address the problem of two-party physical HRIs. We learn the
interaction dynamics from demonstrations, using Hidden Semi-Markov Models
(HSMMs) to model the joint distribution of the interacting agents in the latent
space of a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Our experimental evaluations for
learning HRI from HHI demonstrations show that MILD effectively captures the
multimodality in the latent representations of HRI tasks, allowing us to decode
the varying dynamics occurring in such tasks. Compared to related work, MILD
generates more accurate trajectories for the controlled agent (robot) when
conditioned on the observed agent's (human) trajectory. Notably, MILD can learn
directly from camera-based pose estimations to generate trajectories, which we
then map to a humanoid robot without the need for any additional training.Comment: Accepted at the IEEE-RAS International Conference on Humanoid Robots
(Humanoids) 202
- …