This paper presents an experiment investigating what type of progress feedback users prefer in verbal updates by a robot about remotely performed tasks. Of primary concern is that users find the information presented useful. But as users in their home may be engaged in other activities while they wait for a service, it is also important that information is presented in a way and at a frequency that they do not find distracting or disruptive. We explore these issues through a human-robot interaction experiment involving a simulated food delivery service. We also discuss future research directions that involve giving naive users more input into the planning process.

This paper presents an ongoing collaboration to develop a perceptual anchoring framework which creates and maintains the symbol-percept links concerning household objects. The paper presents an approach to non-trivialize the symbol system using ontologies and allow for HRI via enabling queries about objects properties, their affordances, and their perceptual characteristics as viewed from the robot (e.g. last seen). This position paper describes in brief the objective of creating a long term perceptual anchoring framework for HRI and outlines the preliminary work done this far.

Adaptation is a critical component of collaboration. Nevertheless, online learning is not yet used in most successful human-robot interactions, especially when the human's and robot's goals are not fully aligned. There are at least two barriers to the successful application of online learning in HRI. First, typical machine-learning algorithms do not learn at time scales that support effective interactions with people. Algorithms that learn at sufficiently fast time scales often produce myopic strategies that do not lead to good long-term collaborations. Second, random exploration, a core component of most online-learning algorithms, can be problematic for developing collaborative relationships with a human partner. We anticipate that a new genre of online-learning algorithms can overcome these two barriers when paired with (cheap-talk) communication. In this paper, we overview our efforts in these two areas to produce a situation-independent, learning system that quickly learns to collaborate with a human partner.

In order to successfully interact with multiple humans in social situations, an intelligent robot should have the ability to track multi-humans, and understand their motion intentions. We formalize this problem as a hidden Markov model, and estimate the posterior densities by particle filtering over sets approach. Our approach avoids directly performing observation-to-target association by defining a set as a joint state. The human identification problem is then solved in an expectation-maximization way. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach by both benchamark test and real robot experiments.

The two applications under development The EMOTE project (http://www.emote-project.eu/) is are a Treasure Hunt exercise designed to teach mapreading working towards the development of an empathic robot tutor skills, and a multi-player game Enercities-2 designed to be used with the 11-14 group and a multi-touch table to teach aspects of sustainable urban development.

Teamwork requires mutual trust among team members. Establishing and maintaining trust depends upon alignment of mental models, an aspect of shared awareness. We present a theory of how maintenance of model alignment is integral to fluid changes in relative control authority (i.e., adaptive autonomy) in human-robot teamwork.

Programming by Demonstration (PbD) is an approach to programming robots by demonstrating the desired behavior. Speech is a natural, hands-free way to augment demonstrations with control commands that guide the PbD process. However, existing speech interfaces for PbD systems rely on ad-hoc, predefined command sets that are rigid and require user training. Instead, we aim to develop flexible speech interfaces to accommodate user variations and ambiguous utterances. To that end, we propose to use a situated semantic parser that jointly reasons about the user's speech and the robot's state to resolve ambiguities. In this paper, we describe this approach and compare its utility to a rigid speech command interface.

Moreover, this circular dependence has been shown procedures for designing controllers are needed. While one to be quite problematic in that the more complex the software such approach is to teach a robot via demonstration, the control system is, the harder it is for the human operator to interact behaviors produced by this data-driven technique are with it in a meaningful and predictable manner. The proposed unable to be verified for feasibility or stability. In contrast, automated system therefore will reason explicitly about its sophisticated stability analysis is possible for control behaviors trust in the operator's instruction.

Recent psychological experiments intend to show that social intentions can be read from the recording of motor actions (Becchio, Sartori, and Castiello 2010; Ferri et al. 2011). At the center of the debate is the hypothesis that the motor system is (Blackemore and Decety 2001), or is not (Jacob and Jeannerod 2005) used to recognize social intentions, with a potential openning to a bottom-up understanding of social behavior, agentivity and theory of mind. In (Becchio et al. 2007), the authors proposed to record the arm's trajectories during episodes of a "pick and place" task with a motor vs social outcome. The results provided evidence for differences in motor patterning depending on the social context and intention, but where not yet a direct evidence of the involvement of the motor system in recognizing social intention. In (Becchio, Sartori, and Castiello 2010; Ferri et al. 2011), the authors show how social affordances can change the movement parametrization with the hypothesis that a same action linked to a social context may involve an increase of the index of difficulty.

A paradigm of case-supported principle-based behavior (CPB) is proposed to help ensure ethical behavior of autonomous machines. We argue that ethically significant behavior of autonomous systems should be guided by explicit ethical principles determined through a consensus of ethicists. Such a consensus is likely to emerge in many areas in which autonomous systems are apt to be deployed and for the actions they are liable to undertake, as we are more likely to agree on how machines ought to treat us than on how human beings ought to treat one another. Given such a consensus, particular cases of ethical dilemmas where ethicists agree on the ethically relevant features and the right course of action can be used to help discover principles needed for ethical guidance of the behavior of autonomous systems. Such principles help ensure the ethical behavior of complex and dynamic systems and further serve as a basis for justification of their actions as well as a control abstraction for managing unanticipated behavior. The requirements, methods, implementation, and evaluation components of the CPB paradigm are detailed.