Human–robot interaction is the study of interactions between humans and robots. It is often referred as HRI by researchers. Human–robot interaction is a multidisciplinary field with contributions from human–computer interaction, artificial intelligence, robotics, natural language understanding, and social sciences.
Human-robot interaction has been a topic of both science fiction and academic speculation even before any robots existed. Because HRI depends on a knowledge of (sometimes natural) human communication, many aspects of HRI are continuations of human communications topics that are much older than robotics per se.
The origin of HRI as a discrete problem was stated by 20th-century author Isaac Asimov in 1941, in his novel I, Robot. He states the Three Laws of Robotics as,
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These three laws of robotics determine the idea of safe interaction. The closer the human and the robot get and the more intricate is the relationship the more the risk of a human being injured rises. Nowadays in advanced societies manufacturers employing robots solve this issue by not letting human and robot share the workspace at any time. This is achieved by the extensive use of safe zones and cages. Thus the presence of humans is completely forbidden in the robot workspace while it is working.
With the advances of artificial intelligence, the autonomous robots could eventually have more proactive behaviours, planning their motion in complex unknown environments. These new capabilities would have to keeping safety as a primer issue and as second efficiency. To allow this new generation of robot, research is being made on human detection, motion planning, scene reconstruction, intelligent behaviour through task planning.
The basic goal of HRI is to define a general human model that could lead to principles and algorithms allowing more natural and effective interaction between humans and robots. Research ranges from how humans work with remote, tele-operated unmanned vehicles to peer-to-peer collaboration with anthropomorphic robots.
Many in the field of HRI study how humans collaborate and interact and use those studies to motivate how robots should interact with humans.
Robots are artificial agents with capacities of perception and action in the physical world often referred by researchers as workspace. Their use has been generalized in factories but nowadays they tend to be found in the most technologically advanced societies in such critical domains as search and rescue, military battle, mine and bomb detection, scientific exploration, law enforcement, entertainment, and hospital care.
These new domains of applications imply a closer interaction with the user. The concept of closeness is to be taken in its full meaning, robots and humans share the workspace but also share goals in terms of task achievement. This close interaction needs new theoretical models, on one hand for the robotics scientists who work to improve the robots utility and on the other hand to evaluate the risks and benefits of this new "friend" for our modern society.
With the advance in AI, the research is focusing on one part towards the safest physical interaction. But also on a socially correct interaction, dependent on cultural criteria. The goal is to build an intuitive, and easy communication with the robot through speech, gestures, and facial expressions.
The robot has to adapt itself to our way of expressing desires and orders and not the contrary. But every day environments such as homes have much more complex social rules than those implied by factories or even military environments. Thus, the robot needs perceiving and understanding capacities to build dynamic models of its surroundings. It needs to categorize objects, recognize and locate humans and further their emotions. The need for dynamic capacities pushes forward every sub-field of robotics.
On the other end of HRI research the cognitive modelling of the "relationship" between human and the robots benefits the psychologists and robotic researchers the user study are often of interests on both sides. This research endeavours part of human society.
HRI research spans a wide range of field, some general to the nature of HRI.
Most methods intend to build a 3D model through vision of the environment. The proprioception sensors permit the robot to have information over its own state. This information is relative to a reference.
Methods for perceiving humans in the environment are based on sensor information. Research on sensing components and software lead by Microsoft provide useful results for extracting the human kinematics (see Kinect). An example of older technique is to use colour information for example the fact that for light skinned people the hands are lighter than the clothes worn. In any case a human modelled a priori can then be fitted to the sensor data. The robot builds or has (depending on the level of autonomy the robot has) a 3D mapping of its surroundings to which is assigned the humans locations.
A speech recognition system is used to interpret human desires or commands. By combining the information inferred by proprioception, sensor and speech the human position and state (standing, seated).
Motion planning in dynamic environment is a challenge that is for the moment only achieved for 3 to 10 degrees of freedom robots. Humanoid robots or even 2 armed robots that can have up to 40 degrees of freedom are unsuited for dynamic environments with today's technology. However lower dimensional robots can use potential field method to compute trajectories avoiding collisions with human.
A lot of data has been gathered with regards to user studies. For example, when users encounter proactive behaviour on the part of the robot and the robot does not respect a safety distance, penetrating the user space, he or she might express fear. This is dependent on one person to another. Only intensive experiment can permit a more precise model.
It has been shown that when a robot has no particular use, negative feelings are often expressed. The robot is perceived as useless and its presence becomes annoying.
In another experiment, it has occurred that people tend to attribute to the robot personality characteristics that were not implemented.
In addition to general HRI research, researchers are currently exploring application areas for human-robot interaction systems. Application-oriented research is used to help bring current robotics technologies to bear against problems that exist in today's society. While human-robot interaction is still a rather young area of interest, there is active development and research in many areas.
First responders face take great risks in search and rescue (SAR) settings, which typically involve environments that are unsafe for a human to travel. In addition, technology offers tools for observation that can greatly speed-up and improve the accuracy of human perception. Robots can be used to address these concerns . Research in this area includes efforts to address robot sensing, mobility, navigation, planning, integration, and tele-operated control.
SAR robots have already been deployed to environments such as the Collapse of the World Trade Center.[1]
Other application areas include:
Bartneck and Okada[2] suggest that a robotic user interface can be described by the following four properties:
The International Conference on Social Robotics is a conference for scientists, researchers, and practitioners to report and discuss the latest progress of their forefront research and findings in social robotics, as well as interactions with human beings and integration into our society.
This symposium is organized in collaboration with the Annual Convention of the Society for the Study of Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour.
The IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication ( RO-MAN ) was founded in 1992 by Profs. Toshio Fukuda, Hisato Kobayashi, Hiroshi Harashima and Fumio Hara. Early workshop participants were mostly Japanese, and the first seven workshops were held in Japan. Since 1999, workshops have been held in Europe and the United States as well as Japan, and participation has been of international scope.
This conference is amongst the best conferences in the field of HRI and has a very selective reviewing process. The average acceptance rate is 26% and the average attendance is 187. Around 65% of the contributions to the conference come from the USA and the high level of quality of the submissions to the conference becomes visible by the average of 10 citations that the HRI papers attracted so far.[3]
There are many conferences that are not exclusively HRI, but deal with broad aspects of HRI, and often have HRI papers presented.
There are currently two dedicated HRI Journals
and a new dedicated HRI Journal
and there are several more general journals in which one will find HRI articles.