Robot transparency, trust and utility

As robot reasoning becomes more complex, debugging becomes increasingly hard based solely on observable behaviour, even for robot designers and technical specialists. Similarly, non-specialist users have difficulty creating useful mental models of robot reasoning from observations of robot behaviour. The EPSRC Principles of Robotics mandate that our artefacts should be transparent, but what does this mean in practice, and how does transparency affect both trust and utility? We investigate this relationship in the literature and find it to be complex, particularly in nonindustrial environments where, depending on the application and purpose of the robot, transparency may have a wider range of effects on trust and utility. We outline our programme of research to support our assertion that it is nevertheless possible to create transparent agents that are emotionally engaging despite having a transparent machine nature

Validation of an experimental setup to study atmospheric heterogeneous ozonolysis of semi-volatile organic compounds

International audienceThere is currently a need for reliable experimental procedures to follow the heterogeneous processing simulating the atmospheric conditions. This work offers an alternative experimental device to study the behaviour of semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC) that presumably exhibit extremely slow reactivity (e.g. pesticides) towards the atmospheric oxidants such as ozone and OH. Naphthalene was chosen as a test compound since it was widely studied in the past and hence represents a good reference. Prior to ozone exposure, the gaseous naphthalene was adsorbed via gas-solid equilibrium on silica and XAD-4 particles. Then, the heterogeneous reaction of ozone with adsorbed naphthalene was investigated in specially designed flow tube reactors. After the reaction, the remaining naphthalene (adsorbed on particles surface) was extracted, filtered and analyzed by Gas Chromatography-Flame Ionization Detector (GC-FID). Thus, the kinetics results were obtained following the consumption of naphthalene. Using this procedure, the rate constants of heterogeneous ozonolysis of naphthalene (kO3 silica=2.26 (±0.09)×10−17 cm3 molec−1 s−1 and kO3 XAD-4=4.29 (±1.06)×10−19 cm3 molec−1 s−1) were determined for silica and XAD-4 particles, at 25°C and relative humidity <0.7%. The results show that the nature of the particles significantly affects the kinetics and that heterogeneous ozonolysis of naphthalene is faster than its homogeneous ozonolysis in the gas phase

Communication

From a traditional engineering perspective, communication is about effecting control over a distance, and its primary concern is the reliability of transmission. This chapter reviews communication in nature, describing its evolution from the perspective of the selfish gene. Communication in nature is ubiquitous and generally honest, and arises as much from collaboration as manipulation. We show that context and relevance allow effective communication with little information transfer, particularly between organisms with similar capacities and goals. Human language differs fundamentally from the non-verbal communication we share with other animals; robots may need to accommodate both. We document progress in AI capacities to generate synthetic emotion and to sense and classify human emotion. Communication in contemporary biomimetic systems is between robots in swarm robotics, but also between robot and human for both autonomous and collaborative systems. We suggest increased future emphasis on capacities to receive and comprehend signs, and on the pragmatic utility of communication and cooperation.</p

Instinct:a biologically inspired reactive planner for embedded environments

The Instinct Planner is a new biologically inspired reactive planner, based on an established behaviour basedrobotics methodology and its reactive planner component— the POSH planner implementation. However,it includes several significant enhancements to facilitateplan design and runtime debugging. It has been specifically designed for low power processors and hasa tiny memory footprint. Written in C++, it runs efficientlyon both ARDUINO (ATMEL AVR) and MICROSOFTVC++ environments and has been deployed within a low cost maker robot to study AI Transparency.Plans may be authored using a variety of tools including a promising visual design language, currently implemented using the DIA drawing package