A Framework for Interactive Teaching of Virtual Borders to Mobile Robots

The increasing number of robots in home environments leads to an emerging coexistence between humans and robots. Robots undertake common tasks and support the residents in their everyday life. People appreciate the presence of robots in their environment as long as they keep the control over them. One important aspect is the control of a robot's workspace. Therefore, we introduce virtual borders to precisely and flexibly define the workspace of mobile robots. First, we propose a novel framework that allows a person to interactively restrict a mobile robot's workspace. To show the validity of this framework, a concrete implementation based on visual markers is implemented. Afterwards, the mobile robot is capable of performing its tasks while respecting the new virtual borders. The approach is accurate, flexible and less time consuming than explicit robot programming. Hence, even non-experts are able to teach virtual borders to their robots which is especially interesting in domains like vacuuming or service robots in home environments.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

An explorative study on robotics for supporting children with Autism Spectrum Disorder during clinical procedures

This short report presents a small-scale explorative study about children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) interaction with robots during clinical interactions. This is part of an ongoing project, which aims at defining a robotic service for supporting children with developmental disabilities and increase the efficiency of routine procedures that may create distress, e.g.having blood taken or an orthopaedic plaster cast applied. Five children with confirmed diagnoses of ASD interacted with two social robots: the small humanoid NAO and the pet-like MiRo. The encounters mixed play activities with a simulated clinical procedure. We included parents/carers in the interaction to ensure the child was comfortable and at ease. The results of video analysis and parents' feedback confirm possible benefits of the physical presence of robots to reduce children’s anxiety and increase compliance with instructions. Parents/carers convincingly support the introduction of robots in hospital procedures to their help children

User-centered design of a dynamic-autonomy remote interaction concept for manipulation-capable robots to assist elderly people in the home

In this article, we describe the development of a human-robot interaction concept for service robots to assist elderly people in the home with physical tasks. Our approach is based on the insight that robots are not yet able to handle all tasks autonomously with sufficient reliability in the complex and heterogeneous environments of private homes. We therefore employ remote human operators to assist on tasks a robot cannot handle completely autonomously. Our development methodology was user-centric and iterative, with six user studies carried out at various stages involving a total of 241 participants. The concept is under implementation on the Care-O-bot 3 robotic platform. The main contributions of this article are (1) the results of a survey in form of a ranking of the demands of elderly people and informal caregivers for a range of 25 robot services, (2) the results of an ethnography investigating the suitability of emergency teleassistance and telemedical centers for incorporating robotic teleassistance, and (3) a user-validated human-robot interaction concept with three user roles and corresponding three user interfaces designed as a solution to the problem of engineering reliable service robots for home environments

Robust Spoken Language Understanding for House Service Robots

Service robotics has been growing significantly in thelast years, leading to several research results and to a numberof consumer products. One of the essential features of theserobotic platforms is represented by the ability of interactingwith users through natural language. Spoken commands canbe processed by a Spoken Language Understanding chain, inorder to obtain the desired behavior of the robot. The entrypoint of such a process is represented by an Automatic SpeechRecognition (ASR) module, that provides a list of transcriptionsfor a given spoken utterance. Although several well-performingASR engines are available off-the-shelf, they operate in a generalpurpose setting. Hence, they may be not well suited in therecognition of utterances given to robots in specific domains. Inthis work, we propose a practical yet robust strategy to re-ranklists of transcriptions. This approach improves the quality of ASRsystems in situated scenarios, i.e., the transcription of roboticcommands. The proposed method relies upon evidences derivedby a semantic grammar with semantic actions, designed tomodel typical commands expressed in scenarios that are specificto human service robotics. The outcomes obtained throughan experimental evaluation show that the approach is able toeffectively outperform the ASR baseline, obtained by selectingthe first transcription suggested by the AS

Symbiotic Navigation in Multi-Robot Systems with Remote Obstacle Knowledge Sharing

Large scale operational areas often require multiple service robots for coverage and task parallelism. In such scenarios, each robot keeps its individual map of the environment and serves specific areas of the map at different times. We propose a knowledge sharing mechanism for multiple robots in which one robot can inform other robots about the changes in map, like path blockage, or new static obstacles, encountered at specific areas of the map. This symbiotic information sharing allows the robots to update remote areas of the map without having to explicitly navigate those areas, and plan efficient paths. A node representation of paths is presented for seamless sharing of blocked path information. The transience of obstacles is modeled to track obstacles which might have been removed. A lazy information update scheme is presented in which only relevant information affecting the current task is updated for efficiency. The advantages of the proposed method for path planning are discussed against traditional method with experimental results in both simulation and real environments

Robot programming by demonstration through system identification

Increasingly, personalised robots — robots especially designed and programmed for an individual’s needs and preferences — are being used to support humans in their daily lives, most notably in the area of service robotics. Arguably, the closer the robot is programmed to the individual’s needs, the more useful it is, and we believe that giving people the opportunity to program their own robots, rather than programming robots for them, will push robotics research one step further in the personalised robotics field. However, traditional robot programming techniques require specialised technical skills from different disciplines and it is not reasonable to expect end-users to have these skills. In this paper, we therefore present a new method of obtaining robot control code — programming by demonstration through system identification which algorithmically and automatically transfers human behaviours into robot control code, using transparent, analysable mathematical functions. Besides providing a simple means of generating perception-action mappings, they have the additional advantage that can also be used to form hypotheses and theoretical analysis of robot behaviour. We demonstrate the viability of this approach by teaching a Scitos G5 mobile robot to achieve wall following and corridor passing behaviours

Talking About Task Progress: Towards Integrating Task Planning and Dialog for Assistive Robotic Services

The use of service robots to assist ageing people in their own homes has the potential to allow people to maintain their independence, increasing their health and quality of life. In many assistive applications, robots perform tasks on people’s behalf that they are unable or unwilling to monitor directly. It is important that users be given useful and appropriate information about task progress. People being assisted in homes and other realworld environments are likely be engaged in other activities while they wait for a service, so information should also be presented in an appropriate, nonintrusive manner. This paper presents a human-robot interaction experiment investigatingwhat type of feedback people prefer in verbal updates by a service robot about distributed assistive services. People found feedback about time until task completion more useful than feedback about events in task progress or no feedback. We also discuss future research directions that involve giving non-expert users more input into the task planning process when delays or failures occur that necessitate replanning or modifying goals