scholarly journals Teaching Robots to Interact with Humans in a Smart Environment

Author(s):  
Shivam Goel

Robotics in healthcare has recently emerged, backed by the recent advances in the field of machine learning and robotics. Researchers are focusing on training robots for interacting with elderly adults. This research primarily focuses on engineering more efficient robots that can learn from their mistakes, thereby aiding in better human-robot interaction. In this work, we propose a method in which a robot learns to navigate itself to the individual in need. The robotic agents' learning algorithm will be capable of navigating in an unknown environment. The robot's primary objective is to locate human in a house, and upon finding the human, the goal is to interact with them while complementing their pose and gaze. We propose an end to end learning strategy, which uses a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to train an optimal policy. The idea can be a contribution to better human-robot interaction.

2007 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 391-410 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justine Cassell ◽  
Andrea Tartaro

What is the hallmark of success in human–agent interaction? In animation and robotics, many have concentrated on the looks of the agent — whether the appearance is realistic or lifelike. We present an alternative benchmark that lies in the dyad and not the agent alone: Does the agent’s behavior evoke intersubjectivity from the user? That is, in both conscious and unconscious communication, do users react to behaviorally realistic agents in the same way they react to other humans? Do users appear to attribute similar thoughts and actions? We discuss why we distinguish between appearance and behavior, why we use the benchmark of intersubjectivity, our methodology for applying this benchmark to embodied conversational agents (ECAs), and why we believe this benchmark should be applied to human–robot interaction.


Author(s):  
Louise LePage

AbstractStage plays, theories of theatre, narrative studies, and robotics research can serve to identify, explore, and interrogate theatrical elements that support the effective performance of sociable humanoid robots. Theatre, including its parts of performance, aesthetics, character, and genre, can also reveal features of human–robot interaction key to creating humanoid robots that are likeable rather than uncanny. In particular, this can be achieved by relating Mori's (1970/2012) concept of total appearance to realism. Realism is broader and more subtle in its workings than is generally recognised in its operationalization in studies that focus solely on appearance. For example, it is complicated by genre. A realistic character cast in a detective drama will convey different qualities and expectations than the same character in a dystopian drama or romantic comedy. The implications of realism and genre carry over into real life. As stage performances and robotics studies reveal, likeability depends on creating aesthetically coherent representations of character, where all the parts coalesce to produce a socially identifiable figure demonstrating predictable behaviour.


Author(s):  
Raghuram Mandyam Annasamy ◽  
Katia Sycara

Deep reinforcement learning techniques have demonstrated superior performance in a wide variety of environments. As improvements in training algorithms continue at a brisk pace, theoretical or empirical studies on understanding what these networks seem to learn, are far behind. In this paper we propose an interpretable neural network architecture for Q-learning which provides a global explanation of the model’s behavior using key-value memories, attention and reconstructible embeddings. With a directed exploration strategy, our model can reach training rewards comparable to the state-of-the-art deep Q-learning models. However, results suggest that the features extracted by the neural network are extremely shallow and subsequent testing using out-of-sample examples shows that the agent can easily overfit to trajectories seen during training.


2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessie Y. C. Chen

A military vehicle crew station environment was simulated and a series of three experiments was conducted to examine the workload and performance of the combined position of the gunner and robotics operator in a multitasking environment. The study also evaluated whether aided target recognition (AiTR) capabilities (delivered through tactile and/or visual cuing) for the gunnery task might benefit the concurrent robotics and communication tasks and how the concurrent task performance might be affected when the AiTR was unreliable (i.e., false alarm prone or miss prone). Participants’ spatial ability was consistently found to be a reliable predictor of their targeting task performance as well as their modality preference for the AiTR display. Participants’ attentional control was found to significantly affect the way they interacted with unreliable automated systems.


2015 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-503
Author(s):  
Seoungjae Cho ◽  
Yunsick Sung ◽  
Kyungeun Cho ◽  
Kyhyun Um

The applications of a content-based image retrieval system in fields such as multimedia, security, medicine, and entertainment, have been implemented on a huge real-time database by using a convolutional neural network architecture. In general, thus far, content-based image retrieval systems have been implemented with machine learning algorithms. A machine learning algorithm is applicable to a limited database because of the few feature extraction hidden layers between the input and the output layers. The proposed convolutional neural network architecture was successfully implemented using 128 convolutional layers, pooling layers, rectifier linear unit (ReLu), and fully connected layers. A convolutional neural network architecture yields better results of its ability to extract features from an image. The Euclidean distance metric is used for calculating the similarity between the query image and the database images. It is implemented using the COREL database. The proposed system is successfully evaluated using precision, recall, and F-score. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated using the precision and recall.


Complexity ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-25
Author(s):  
Pablo Adasme ◽  
Ali Dehghan Firoozabadi

Let G V , E be a simple undirected complete graph with vertex and edge sets V and E , respectively. In this paper, we consider the degree-constrained k -minimum spanning tree (DC k MST) problem which consists of finding a minimum cost subtree of G formed with at least k vertices of V where the degree of each vertex is less than or equal to an integer value d ≤ k − 2 . In particular, in this paper, we consider degree values of d ∈ 2,3 . Notice that DC k MST generalizes both the classical degree-constrained and k -minimum spanning tree problems simultaneously. In particular, when d = 2 , it reduces to a k -Hamiltonian path problem. Application domains where DC k MST can be adapted or directly utilized include backbone network structures in telecommunications, facility location, and transportation networks, to name a few. It is easy to see from the literature that the DC k MST problem has not been studied in depth so far. Thus, our main contributions in this paper can be highlighted as follows. We propose three mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) models for the DC k MST problem and derive for each one an equivalent counterpart by using the handshaking lemma. Then, we further propose ant colony optimization (ACO) and variable neighborhood search (VNS) algorithms. Each proposed ACO and VNS method is also compared with another variant of it which is obtained while embedding a Q-learning strategy. We also propose a pure Q-learning algorithm that is competitive with the ACO ones. Finally, we conduct substantial numerical experiments using benchmark input graph instances from TSPLIB and randomly generated ones with uniform and Euclidean distance costs with up to 400 nodes. Our numerical results indicate that the proposed models and algorithms allow obtaining optimal and near-optimal solutions, respectively. Moreover, we report better solutions than CPLEX for the large-size instances. Ultimately, the empirical evidence shows that the proposed Q-learning strategies can bring considerable improvements.


Author(s):  
Taras Iakymchuk ◽  
Alfredo Rosado-Muñoz ◽  
Juan F Guerrero-Martínez ◽  
Manuel Bataller-Mompeán ◽  
Jose V Francés-Víllora

2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matt Webster ◽  
David Western ◽  
Dejanira Araiza-Illan ◽  
Clare Dixon ◽  
Kerstin Eder ◽  
...  

We present an approach for the verification and validation (V&V) of robot assistants in the context of human–robot interactions, to demonstrate their trustworthiness through corroborative evidence of their safety and functional correctness. Key challenges include the complex and unpredictable nature of the real world in which assistant and service robots operate, the limitations on available V&V techniques when used individually, and the consequent lack of confidence in the V&V results. Our approach, called corroborative V&V, addresses these challenges by combining several different V&V techniques; in this paper we use formal verification (model checking), simulation-based testing, and user validation in experiments with a real robot. This combination of approaches allows V&V of the human–robot interaction task at different levels of modeling detail and thoroughness of exploration, thus overcoming the individual limitations of each technique. We demonstrate our approach through a handover task, the most critical part of a complex cooperative manufacturing scenario, for which we propose safety and liveness requirements to verify and validate. Should the resulting V&V evidence present discrepancies, an iterative process between the different V&V techniques takes place until corroboration between the V&V techniques is gained from refining and improving the assets (i.e., system and requirement models) to represent the human–robot interaction task in a more truthful manner. Therefore, corroborative V&V affords a systematic approach to “meta-V&V,” in which different V&V techniques can be used to corroborate and check one another, increasing the level of certainty in the results of V&V.


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