A Text Mining Analysis of Digital Twins for HRI

The interest for digital twins has kept rising over the recent years. With potential applications in different sectors, digital twins, like other robotic and autonomous systems, will have to interact with humans and in many cases collaborate with them. The present paper is a work in progress and applies text mining techniques to explore the use of digital twins for human-robot interaction scenarios

Towards game theoretic AV controllers: measuring pedestrian behaviour in Virtual Reality

Understanding pedestrian interaction is of great importance for autonomous vehicles (AVs). The present study investigates pedestrian behaviour during crossing scenarios with an autonomous vehicle using Virtual Reality. The self-driving car is driven by a game theoretic controller which adapts its driving style to pedestrian crossing behaviour. We found that subjects value collision avoidance about 8 times more than saving 0.02 seconds. A previous lab study found time saving to be more important than collision avoidance in a highly unrealistic board game style version of the game. The present result suggests that the VR simulation reproduces real world road-crossings better than the lab study and provides a reliable test-bed for the development of game theoretic models for AVs

Filtration analysis of pedestrian-vehicle interactions for autonomous vehicle control

Abstract. Interacting with humans remains a challenge for autonomous vehicles (AVs). When a pedestrian wishes to cross the road in front of the vehicle at an unmarked crossing, the pedestrian and AV must compete for the space, which may be considered as a game-theoretic interaction in which one agent must yield to the other. To inform development of new real-time AV controllers in this setting, this study collects and analy- ses detailed, manually-annotated, temporal data from real-world human road crossings as they interact with manual drive vehicles. It studies the temporal orderings (filtrations) in which features are revealed to the ve- hicle and their informativeness over time. It presents a new framework suggesting how optimal stopping controllers may then use such data to enable an AV to decide when to act (by speeding up, slowing down, or otherwise signalling intent to the pedestrian) or alternatively, to continue at its current speed in order to gather additional information from new features, including signals from that pedestrian, before acting itself

Unfreezing autonomous vehicles with game theory, proxemics, and trust

Recent years have witnessed the rapid deployment of robotic systems in public places such as roads, pavements, workplaces and care homes. Robot navigation in environments with static objects is largely solved, but navigating around humans in dynamic environments remains an active research question for autonomous vehicles (AVs). To navigate in human social spaces, self-driving cars and other robots must also show social intelligence. This involves predicting and planning around pedestrians, understanding their personal space, and establishing trust with them. Most current AVs, for legal and safety reasons, consider pedestrians to be obstacles, so these AVs always stop for or replan to drive around them. But this highly safe nature may lead pedestrians to take advantage over them and slow their progress, even to a complete halt. We provide a review of our recent research on predicting and controlling human–AV interactions, which combines game theory, proxemics and trust, and unifies these fields via quantitative, probabilistic models and robot controllers, to solve this “freezing robot” problem

Extending Quantitative Proxemics and Trust to HRI

Human-robot interaction (HRI) requires quantitative models of proxemics and trust for robots to use in negotiating with people for space. Hall’s theory of proxemics has been used for decades to describe social interaction distances but has lacked detailed quantitative models and generative explanations to apply to these cases. In the limited case of autonomous vehicle interactions with pedestrians crossing a road, a recent model has explained the quantitative sizes of Hall’s distances to 4% error and their links to the concept of trust in human interactions. The present study extends this model by generalising several of its assumptions to cover further cases including human-human and human-robot interactions. It tightens the explanations of Hall zones from 4% to 1% error and fits several more recent empirical HRI results. This may help to further unify these disparate fields and quantify them to a level which enables real-world operational HRI applications

EMap: Real-time Terrain Estimation

Terrain mapping has a many use cases in both land surveyance and autonomous vehicles. Popular methods generate occupancy maps over 3D space, which are sub-optimal in outdoor scenarios with large, clear spaces where gaps in LiDAR readings are common. A terrain can instead be modelled as a height map over 2D space which can iteratively be updated with incoming LiDAR data, which simplifies computation and allows missing points to be estimated based on the current terrain estimate. The latter point is of particular interest, since it can reduce the data collection effort required (and its associated costs) and current options are not suitable to real-time operation. In this work, we introduce a new method that is capable of performing such terrain mapping and inferencing tasks in real-time. We evaluate it with a set of mapping scenarios and show it is capable of generating maps with higher accuracy than an OctoMap-based method

EMap: Real-time Terrain Estimation

Terrain mapping has a many use cases in both land surveyance and autonomous vehicles. Popular methods generate occupancy maps over 3D space, which are sub-optimal in outdoor scenarios with large, clear spaces where gaps in LiDAR readings are common. A terrain can instead be modelled as a height map over 2D space which can iteratively be updated with incoming LiDAR data, which simplifies computation and allows missing points to be estimated based on the current terrain estimate. The latter point is of particular interest, since it can reduce the data collection effort required (and its associated costs) and current options are not suitable to real-time operation. In this work, we introduce a new method that is capable of performing such terrain mapping and inferencing tasks in real-time. We evaluate it with a set of mapping scenarios and show it is capable of generating maps with higher accuracy than an OctoMap-based method

Evaluation Of OSMC Open Source Motor Driver for Reproducible Robotics Research

There is a growing need for open source hardware (OSH) subcomponents to be evaluated. Most robotic systems are ultimately based upon motors which are driven to move either to certain positions, as in robot arms, or to certain velocities, as in wheeled mobile robots. We evaluate a state of the art OSH driver, OSMC, for such systems, and contribute new Open Source Software to control it. Our findings suggest that OSMC is now mature enough to replace closed-source motor drivers in medium-size robots such as agri-robots and last mile delivery vehicles

OpenPodcar: An Open Source Vehicle for Self-Driving Car Research

OpenPodcar is a low-cost, open source hardware and software, autonomous vehicle research platform based on an off-the-shelf, hard-canopy, mobility scooter donor vehicle. Hardware and software build instructions are provided to convert the donor vehicle into a low-cost and fully autonomous platform. The open platform consists of (a) hardware components: CAD designs, bill of materials, and build instructions; (b) Arduino, ROS and Gazebo control and simulation software files which provide standard ROS interfaces and simulation of the vehicle; and (c) higher-level ROS software implementations and configurations of standard robot autonomous planning and control, including the move\_base interface with Timed-Elastic-Band planner which enacts commands to drive the vehicle from a current to a desired pose around obstacles. The vehicle is large enough to transport a human passenger or similar load at speeds up to 15km/h, for example for use as a last-mile autonomous taxi service or to transport delivery containers similarly around a city center. It is small and safe enough to be parked in a standard research lab and be used for realistic human-vehicle interaction studies. System build cost from new components is around USD7,000 in total in 2022. OpenPodcar thus provides a good balance between real world utility, safety, cost and research convenience

Towards pedestrian-AV interaction: method for elucidating pedestrian preferences

Autonomous vehicle navigation around human pedestrians remains a challenge due to the potential for complex interactions and feedback loops between the agents. As a small step towards better understanding of these interactions, this Methods Paper presents a new empirical protocol based on tracking real humans in a controlled lab environment, which is able to make inferences about the human’s preferences for interaction (how they trade off the cost of their time against the cost of a collision). Knowledge of such preferences if collected in more realistic environments could then be used by future AVs to predict and control for pedestrian behaviour. This study is intended as a work-in-progress report on methods working towards real-time and less controlled experiments, demonstrating successful use of several key components required by such systems, but in its more controlled setting. This suggests that these components could be extended to more realistic situations and results in an ongoing research programme