Technology
A Few Issues on Human-Robot Interaction for Multiple Persistent Service Mobile Robots
Veloso, Manuela (Carnegie Mellon University)
AI and robotics researchers aim at having robots in our environments coexisting with humans, as artificial creatures that will help humans and collaborate with humans to improve our societies. There will be more than one robot. Robots will not interact with some humans just once, or a few times, but many times. Humans will interact with robots to change their requests and to teach and correct their behaviors. This abstract briefly discusses a few issues for AI and HRI for such challenging repeated interactions in space and time between robots and humans. We have made different levels of research progress on these issues, as we discuss. Our presentation is motivated by our work with the CoBot mobile service robots, which have been running in our environments for the last three years, and for more than 500kms.
A Perspective on Human-Robot Interaction for NASAโs Human Exploration Missions
Schreckenghost, Debra (TRACLabs) | Milam, Tod (TRACLabs) | Fong, Terrence (NASA Ames Research Center)
As astronauts move deeper into space they must also become more autonomous from mission control on Earth. As a result, astronauts must take on additional responsibilities for jobs typically performed by flight controllers today, and crew workload and training requirements are expected to increase. Robotic automation has potential to reduce crew workload and training needs. Additionally robots with some level of autonomy can reduce human risk by per-forming hazardous tasks that crew would otherwise have to perform. We are working with NASA to investigate new concepts of operation for astronauts interacting with autonomous robots in space, including remote supervision of a planetary robot by an astronaut orbiting the planet and remote understanding of robotic activities without eyes-on monitoring. We also are developing techniques for computing and analyzing agent performance for the roles and responsibilities needed for these ConOps, and have developed software to compute these performance measures for humans and robots in-line during mission operations. We describe results of using this software to monitor rover performance during multiple NASA robotic field tests and analog mission simulations.
Conscious Machines: The AI Perspective
Reggia, James (University of Maryland)
Efforts to study computational aspects of the conscious mind have made substantial progress, but have yet to provide a compelling route to creating a phenomenally conscious machine. Here I suggest that an important reason for this is the computational explanatory gap: our inability to explain the implementation of high level cognitive algorithms that are of interest in AI in terms of neurocomputational processing. Bridging this gap could contribute to further progress in machine consciousness, to producing artificial general intelligence, and to understanding the fundamental nature of consciousness.
Behavioural Domain Knowledge Transfer for Autonomous Agents
Rosman, Benjamin Saul (The Council for Scientific and Industrial Research)
An agent continuously performing different tasks in the same domain has the opportunity to learn, over the course of its operational lifetime, about the behavioural regularities afforded by the domain. This paper addresses the problem of learning a task independent behaviour model based on the underlying structure of a domain which is common across multiple tasks presented to an autonomous agent. Our approach involves learning action priors: a behavioural model which encodes a notion of local common sense behaviours in the domain, conditioned on either the state or observations of the agent. This knowledge is accumulated and transferred as an exploration behaviour whenever a new task is presented to the agent. The effect is that as the agent encounters more tasks, it is able to learn them faster and achieve greater overall performance. This approach is illustrated in experiments in a simulated extended navigation domain.
Shared Awareness, Autonomy and Trust in Human-Robot Teamwork
Atkinson, David J. (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) | Clancey, William J. (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition) | Clark, Micah H. (Institute for Human and Machine Cognition)
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.
Robotic and Virtual Companions for Isolated Older Adults
Sidner, Candace (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) | Rich, Charles (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) | Shayganfar, Mohammad (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) | Behrooz, Morteza (Worcester Polytechnic Institute) | Bickmore, Tim (Northeastern University) | Ring, Lazlo (Northeastern University) | Zhang, Zessie (Northeastern University)
The agent is "always on," i.e. it is continuously available and aware (using a camera and infrared motion sensor) when the user is in its presence and can initiate interaction with the user, rather than requiring the user login to begin interaction. We expect that the agent will help reduce the user's isolation not just by always being around but also by specific activities that connect the user with friends, family and the local community. Our goal is for the agent to be a natural, humanlike presence that "resides" in the user's apartment. Beginning in the late summer of 2014, we will be placing our agents with users for a monthlong evaluation study. Figure 1: Virtual agent interface -- "Karen" Three issues of our project directly concern the topics of this workshop are: (1) the embodiment of the agent, (2) the engagement behaviors that are associated with being "always measures we will be using are questionnaires that assess the on," and (3) AI tools for support intelligent behavior.
Toward Next Generation Integrative Semantic Health Information Assistants
Patton, Evan W. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute) | McGuinness, Deborah L. (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)
We can also leverage medical ontologies/taxonomies to help Traditionally, artificial intelligence in medical applications abstract specific details to concepts that can be more easily has focused on improving the abilities of medical professionals introduced and then later refined when a patient is ready. Additionally, to perform tasks such as diagnosis (e.g., Shortliffe we can have annotations to provide information 1986; Wyatt and Spiegelhalter 1991; Garg et al. 2005; Vihinen about the authoritativeness of content. Furthermore, in many and Samarghitean 2008) or to aid in managing drug interactions cases information will need to travel beyond the patient to (e.g., Bindoff et al. 2007) or side effects (Edwards family or hired caregivers (Williams et al. 2002, p. 387), and Aronson 2000, p. 1258). These efforts target users who which means that multiple explanations will need to be generated have years of medical experience. In contrast, patients often based on the target individual's knowledge. Explanation have limited medical knowledge, and they may be coping generation also involves applications of user modeling with new life-threatening diagnoses that may require a number (e.g.
Humanoid Robots Discovering Creative Concepts Through Social Interaction
Williams, Andrew B. (Marquette University Milwaukee) | Russell, Elise (Marquette University Milwaukee)
Psychologists and social scientists have been researching creativity in humans for several years, and it has gained the attention of artificial intelligence and robotics researchers as well. In this abstract, we discuss the emotional and conversational interface required for a humanoid robot to socially interact with children in order to learn new creative concepts. We briefly describe the approach we are taking to develop such a humanoid robot that can collaborate with children to discover creative concepts.
Metaphysical Conservatism and Mechanical Characteristics of Human Nature
Dellinger, Brian J. (North Carolina State University) | Doyle, Jon (North Carolina State University)
We sketch some reasons for thinking that modern formulations of mechanics might shed some light on old questions about human nature, in particular the malleability of human nature and the character of limits on cognition and volition. We illustrate the approach by showing how to regard certain forces that depend on mental states or the states of artificial controllers as interaction forces between minds or controllers and their environments, thus allowing physical measurement of some mental properties.