Initial Task Allocation for Multi-Human Multi-Robot Teams with Attention-based Deep Reinforcement Learning

Multi-human multi-robot teams have great potential for complex and large-scale tasks through the collaboration of humans and robots with diverse capabilities and expertise. To efficiently operate such highly heterogeneous teams and maximize team performance timely, sophisticated initial task allocation strategies that consider individual differences across team members and tasks are required. While existing works have shown promising results in reallocating tasks based on agent state and performance, the neglect of the inherent heterogeneity of the team hinders their effectiveness in realistic scenarios. In this paper, we present a novel formulation of the initial task allocation problem in multi-human multi-robot teams as contextual multi-attribute decision-make process and propose an attention-based deep reinforcement learning approach. We introduce a cross-attribute attention module to encode the latent and complex dependencies of multiple attributes in the state representation. We conduct a case study in a massive threat surveillance scenario and demonstrate the strengths of our model.Comment: Accepted to IROS202

Feedback-efficient Active Preference Learning for Socially Aware Robot Navigation

Socially aware robot navigation, where a robot is required to optimize its trajectory to maintain comfortable and compliant spatial interactions with humans in addition to reaching its goal without collisions, is a fundamental yet challenging task in the context of human-robot interaction. While existing learning-based methods have achieved better performance than the preceding model-based ones, they still have drawbacks: reinforcement learning depends on the handcrafted reward that is unlikely to effectively quantify broad social compliance, and can lead to reward exploitation problems; meanwhile, inverse reinforcement learning suffers from the need for expensive human demonstrations. In this paper, we propose a feedback-efficient active preference learning approach, FAPL, that distills human comfort and expectation into a reward model to guide the robot agent to explore latent aspects of social compliance. We further introduce hybrid experience learning to improve the efficiency of human feedback and samples, and evaluate benefits of robot behaviors learned from FAPL through extensive simulation experiments and a user study (N=10) employing a physical robot to navigate with human subjects in real-world scenarios. Source code and experiment videos for this work are available at:https://sites.google.com/view/san-fapl.Comment: To appear in IROS 202

Implications of Personality on Cognitive Workload, Affect, and Task Performance in Remote Robot Control

This paper explores how the personality traits of robot operators can influence their task performance during remote control of robots. It is essential to explore the impact of personal dispositions on information processing, both directly and indirectly, when working with robots on specific tasks. To investigate this relationship, we utilize the open-access multi-modal dataset MOCAS to examine the robot operator's personality traits, affect, cognitive load, and task performance. Our objective is to confirm if personality traits have a total effect, including both direct and indirect effects, that could significantly impact the performance levels of operators. Specifically, we examine the relationship between personality traits such as extroversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, and task performance. We conduct a correlation analysis between cognitive load, self-ratings of workload and affect, and quantified individual personality traits along with their experimental scores. The findings show that personality traits do not have a total effect on task performance.Comment: 8 pages, 6 figures, accepted to IROS 2023. A link to a supplementary video is in the abstrac

Robotics and IoT: Interdisciplinary Applied Research in the RIoT Zone

Short Abstract: Robotics and the Internet of Things are intrinsically multi-disciplinary subjects that investigate the interaction between the physical and the cyber worlds and how they impact society. As a result, they not only demand careful consideration of digital and analog technologies, but also the human element. The “RIoT Zone” brings together disparate people and ideas to address intuitive autonomy. Full Abstract: Robotics and the Internet of Things are intrinsically multi-disciplinary subjects that investigate the interaction between the physical and the cyber worlds and how they impact society. As a result, they not only demand careful consideration of digital and analog technologies, but also the human element. The “RIoT Zone” brings together disparate people and ideas to address a human-centric form of intelligence we call “intuitive autonomy”. This talk will describe human/robot interaction and the programming of robots by human demonstration from the perspectives of Engineering Technology, Computer Information Technology, Industrial Engineering and Psychology