Autonomous robots acting as companions or assistants in real social environments should be able to sustain and operate over an extended period of time. Generally, autonomous mobile robots draw power from batteries to operate various sensors, actuators and perform tasks. Batteries have a limited power life and take a long time to recharge via a power source, which may impede human-robot interaction and task performance. Thus, it is important for social robots to manage their energy, this paper discusses an approach to manage power resources on mobile robot with regard to social aspects for creating life-like autonomous social robots

Aylett, Ruth

Deshmukh, Amol

English

Amol Deshmukh

Ruth Aylett

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Socially constrained management of power resources for social mobile robots

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    Deshmukh, A.  and Aylett, R. (2012) Socially Constrained Management Of Power Resources For Social Mobile Robots. In: 7th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Boston, MA, USA, 5-8 March 2012, pp. 119-120. ISBN 9781450310635(doi:10.1145/2157689.2157714)  This is the author’s final accepted version.  There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it.  http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/161208/                              Deposited on: 24 April 2018  Enlighten – Research publications by members of the University of Glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk  Socially Constrained Management Of Power ResourcesFor Social Mobile RobotsAmol DeshmukhHeriot-Watt UniversityEdinburgh, United Kingdoma.deshmukh@hw.ac.ukRuth AylettHeriot-Watt UniversityEdinburgh, United Kingdomruth@macs.hw.ac.ukABSTRACTAutonomous robots acting as companions or assistants inreal social environments should be able to sustain and oper-ate over an extended period of time. Generally, autonomousmobile robots draw power from batteries to operate varioussensors, actuators and perform tasks. Batteries have a lim-ited power life and take a long time to recharge via a powersource, which may impede human-robot interaction and taskperformance. Thus, it is important for social robots to man-age their energy, this paper discusses an approach to man-age power resources on mobile robot with regard to socialaspects for creating life-like autonomous social robots.Categories and Subject DescriptorsI.2.9 [Artificial Intelligence]: RoboticsGeneral TermsHuman Factors, Algorithms, TheoryKeywordsRobot Companions, Power Management, Social Constraints,Human-robot Interaction1. INTRODUCTIONIn order for robots to act as companions or assistants insocial environments such as homes and offices, they shouldbe capable of operating with a great degree of autonomy overa longer period of time. While acting as an artificial socialbeing a robot still needs to fulfill its own physiological needs.Most autonomous mobile robots draw power from batteriesand take a long time to recharge. While the recharge be-haviour is active, the companion robot may be preventedfrom performing its normal tasks and this may hinder con-tinuous human-robot interactions.The robot should also be competent enough to regulatethe use of its power resources when it has no active tasksin order to conserve battery. We believe that companionrobots should behave in a socially intelligent manner[3] andperform life-like actions to be perceived as a social being.In this paper we present an approach to power managementfor mobile robots which has a human-like regulation systemthat can balance both its physiological and social needs.Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).HRI’12, March 5–8, 2012, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.ACM 978-1-4503-1063-5/12/03.2. SCENARIOThe work reported here is carried out as a part of the EUproject LIREC (LIving with Robots and IntEractive Com-panions), the project aims to create interactive, emotion-ally intelligent companions which are capable of establishinglong-term relationships with humans in social environments.The “Spirit of the Building” showcase at the Heriot-WattUniversity, Edinburgh, aims to produce a social helper robotthat can act as a “Team Buddy” an assistant within a labinhabited by a group of people who work there and facilitatelong-term relationships with users. The Team Buddy wouldperform tasks such as carrying the phone to users, givingout reminders, providing a lab tour for visitors, approachingand greeting users, maintaining a collective memory aboutuser preferences such as lunch breaks and entry/exit time.The robot (Pioneer P3AT) with an enhanced superstruc-ture is equipped with a laptop PC, and with 6 lead acid bat-teries (12V, 7Ah each) offering an approximate operationaltime of 6 hours when fully charged (depending on usage).These batteries require about 8 hours to recharge. Con-sidering this long recharge time and that the robot has toperform several tasks every day, there is an urgent need fora power management strategy. The robot is also equippedwith electronic relays boards (controls the switching of sen-sors, actuators, laptop) and power sensors to measure powerconsumption on sensors, actuators and laptop.3. APPROACHThe LIREC project has developed a three-level architec-ture in which the most abstract and top-most level reuseswork from an earlier EU project1. FAtiMA-PSI is a body-mind architecture in the Physiological vs Cognitive dimen-sion, where goals are originated from drives. FAtiMA is anextension of the BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions) delibera-tive architecture [1], that incorporates a reactive componentmainly responsible for emotional expressivity and it employsthe OCC [5] emotional influences on the agent’s decisionmaking processes. FAtiMA architecture is integrated withPSI [4], is a psychologically-founded theory that incorpo-rates all basic components of human action regulation suchas perception, motivation, cognition, memory, learning andemotions in one model of the human psyche.The goals in the overall architecture are derived from a setof basic drives that guide actions. Five basic drives from PSIinclude: Energy, Integrity, Affiliation, Certainty and Com-petence. Energy represents an overall need to preserve the1www.e-circus.org/existence of the robot. Integrity represents well being, i.e.the agent avoids pain or physical damage while affiliationis useful for social relationships. Certainty and competenceinfluence cognitive processes and their values can be calcu-lated automatically. Homeostasis is the main mechanism sothat deviations from an upper and lower set point determinethe strength of each need. Needs can emerge depending onactivities of the robot or grow over time. To be able toproduce actions that are able to satisfy needs in a certainsituation, the robot builds up intentions that are stored inmemory and are - when selected - the basis of a plan.Each need has value ranging from 0 to 10, where 0 meanscomplete deprivation while 10 means complete satisfaction.A weight ranging from 0 to 1 gives the importance of eachneed to the robot. In order to operate appropriately, therobot has to reduce a needs deviation from a fixed thresh-old as much as possible at all time. The strength of aneed (Strength(d)) depends on its current strength plus theamount of deviation from the set point and the specificweight of the needStrength(d) = Strength(d) + (Deviation(d)×Weight(d))By assigning appropriate weights for energy and affiliation(social) needs, robot has the ability to balance both its phys-iological and social needs. During the start of an interaction,the robot will have a set of initial values for all the needs.Based on the level of its current needs, the robot can gener-ate intentions, that is, it activates goal(s) that are relevantto the perceived situation.Each goal contains information about its expected contri-bution to energy, integrity and affiliation, that is, how muchthe drives may be deviated from or satisfied if the goal isperformed. Based on this information, the importance ofgoal at a particular time instance can be determined, allow-ing the robot to give priority to goals that satisfy its needsunder different situations.For example, assume the robot has a task to give a re-minder to a particular user in the lab, and that this goalcan be achieved by Action A or Action B. Action A has aplan involving sub tasks such as navigating to the user’s deskand speaking out the reminder message (causing a change of+4 for affiliation but a change of -2 for energy value). Ac-tion B has a plan of just speaking out the reminder messagewithout navigating (causing +2 change for affiliation butonly a change of -0.5 for energy value). The robot is likelyto select Action B in a situation when its current value forenergy is low but will perform the same goal. Using thisapproach the robot can balance its needs in physiological vssocial dimension.4. FUTURE WORK AND CONCLUSIONThe architecture FAtiMA-PSI is operational in its currentstate, but it only takes into account fixed predefined valuesfor needs which decay automatically with time. Howeverfixed values for energy deviation are not realistic and theseshould take into account the real battery state. We wouldlike to extend the functionality of the system to link theenergy value to real battery state to more accurately rep-resent energy decay. We also aim to develop a method tomonitor and calculate the power consumption of each actionand link it to deviation values for energy for each task (goalexecution) refer Figure 1.Figure 1: Proposed SystemFurther more we plan to implement a competency man-ager to manage competencies (competencies are programsthat abstract physical sensors and actuators to logical onese.g navigation, face detection etc.). The competency man-ager will also be responsible for regulating the switching ofresources (the physical sensors and actuators) by using on-board relays on the robot in order to conserve power whilenot performing tasks. The regulation of resources behaviouris also found in living beings in form of homeostasis [2].The challenges with limited battery life on mobile robots,constrain the operational time of mobile robots. We believethat companion robots should behave in a socially intelligentmanner to manage the power resources on the robot. In thispaper we discussed an approach to power management forsocial robots which has human-like regulation system thatcan balance both its physiological and social needs. Addi-tionally, a continuous interaction and task performance withthe human users can be maintained.5. ACKNOWLEDGMENTSThis work is supported by European Community (EC)and is currently funded by the EU FP7 ICT-215554 projectLIREC (LIving with Robots and IntEractive Companions).The authors are solely responsible for the content of thispublication. It does not represent the opinion of the EC,and the EC is not responsible for any use that might bemade of data appearing therein.6. REFERENCES[1] M. Bratman. Intention,Plans and Practical Reasoning.Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts,1987.[2] W. B. Cannon. Organization for physiologicalhomeostasis. Physiological Review, 9:399431, 1929.[3] K. Dautenhahn. Socially intelligent robots: Dimensionsof human- robot interaction. Philosophical Transactionsof the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences,362(1480):679–704, April 2007.[4] Do¨rner. The mathematics of emotions. In FifthInternational Conference on Cognitive Modeling, pages75–79. Bamberg, Germany, April 2003.[5] A. Ortony, G. Clore, and A. Collins. The cognitivestructure of emotions. Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, UK, 1988.

Socially Constrained Management Of Power Resources For Social Mobile Robots

Enlighten: Publications

Autonomous robots acting as companions or assistants in

real social environments should be able to sustain and operate over an extended

period of time. Generally, autonomous mobile robots draw power

from batteries to operate various sensors, actuators and perform tasks.

Batteries have a limited power life and take a long time to recharge via a

power source, which may impede human-robot interaction and task performance.

Thus, it is important for social robots to manage their energy,

this paper discusses an approach to manage power resources on mobile

robot with regard to social aspects for creating life-like autonomous social

robots

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Socially Constrained Management Of Power Resources For Social Mobile Robots

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