scholarly journals A Bio-inspired Motivational Decision Making System for Social Robots Based on the Perception of the User

Sensors ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (8) ◽  
pp. 2691 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcos Maroto-Gómez ◽  
Álvaro Castro-González ◽  
José Castillo ◽  
María Malfaz ◽  
Miguel Salichs

Nowadays, many robotic applications require robots making their own decisions and adapting to different conditions and users. This work presents a biologically inspired decision making system, based on drives, motivations, wellbeing, and self-learning, that governs the behavior of the robot considering both internal and external circumstances. In this paper we state the biological foundations that drove the design of the system, as well as how it has been implemented in a real robot. Following a homeostatic approach, the ultimate goal of the robot is to keep its wellbeing as high as possible. In order to achieve this goal, our decision making system uses learning mechanisms to assess the best action to execute at any moment. Considering that the proposed system has been implemented in a real social robot, human-robot interaction is of paramount importance and the learned behaviors of the robot are oriented to foster the interactions with the user. The operation of the system is shown in a scenario where the robot Mini plays games with a user. In this context, we have included a robust user detection mechanism tailored for short distance interactions. After the learning phase, the robot has learned how to lead the user to interact with it in a natural way.

Author(s):  
Giorgio Metta

This chapter outlines a number of research lines that, starting from the observation of nature, attempt to mimic human behavior in humanoid robots. Humanoid robotics is one of the most exciting proving grounds for the development of biologically inspired hardware and software—machines that try to recreate billions of years of evolution with some of the abilities and characteristics of living beings. Humanoids could be especially useful for their ability to “live” in human-populated environments, occupying the same physical space as people and using tools that have been designed for people. Natural human–robot interaction is also an important facet of humanoid research. Finally, learning and adapting from experience, the hallmark of human intelligence, may require some approximation to the human body in order to attain similar capacities to humans. This chapter focuses particularly on compliant actuation, soft robotics, biomimetic robot vision, robot touch, and brain-inspired motor control in the context of the iCub humanoid robot.


2011 ◽  
Vol 30 (5) ◽  
pp. 846-868 ◽  
Author(s):  
Estela Bicho ◽  
Wolfram Erlhagen ◽  
Luis Louro ◽  
Eliana Costa e Silva

Author(s):  
Matthias Scheutz ◽  
Paul Schermerhorn

Effective decision-making under real-world conditions can be very difficult as purely rational methods of decision-making are often not feasible or applicable. Psychologists have long hypothesized that humans are able to cope with time and resource limitations by employing affective evaluations rather than rational ones. In this chapter, we present the distributed integrated affect cognition and reflection architecture DIARC for social robots intended for natural human-robot interaction and demonstrate the utility of its human-inspired affect mechanisms for the selection of tasks and goals. Specifically, we show that DIARC incorporates affect mechanisms throughout the architecture, which are based on “evaluation signals” generated in each architectural component to obtain quick and efficient estimates of the state of the component, and illustrate the operation and utility of these mechanisms with examples from human-robot interaction experiments.


Author(s):  
Tamanna E Kaonain ◽  
Mohd Azizi Abdul Rahman ◽  
Mohd Hatta Mohammed Ariff ◽  
Kuheli Mondal

In human-robot interaction, the use of collaborative robots or cobots in many industries is of major importance to researchers in human-robot interaction (HRI). The interaction between human robot carries several challenges, the greatest being the risk of human injury. In addition to reducing the proximity between robots and humans, increased difficulty of human-robot encounters raises the likelihood of accidents only. This paper proposes a virtual collaborative robot in the simulated non-industrial workspace. The safety during human-robot interaction using simulation software was investigated by measuring the risks for planning and control. A reactive robot controller was formulated to minimize the risk during human-robot interaction. A Gazebo software is used in this article, written in Python language, to replicate complex environments that a robot can face. This paper also investigated the robot’s speed. It can be reduced before a collision with a human about to happen, and it minimized the risk of the collision or reduced the damage of the risk. After the successful simulation, this can be applied to the real robot in a practical domestic environment.


Author(s):  
Gianpaolo Gulletta ◽  
Wolfram Erlhagen ◽  
Estela Bicho

In the last decade, the objectives outlined by the needs of personal robotics have led to the rise of new biologically-inspired techniques for arm motion planning. This paper presents a literature review of the most recent research on the generation of human-like arm movements in humanoid and manipulation robotic systems. Search methods and inclusion criteria are described. The studies are analysed taking into consideration the sources of publication, the experimental settings, the type of movements, the technical approach, and the human motor principles that have been used to inspire and assess human-likeness. Results show that there is a strong focus on the generation of single-arm reaching movements and biomimetic-based methods. However, there has been poor attention to manipulation, obstacle-avoidance mechanisms, and dual-arm motion generation. For these reasons, human-like arm motion generation may not fully respect human behavioural and neurological key features and may result restricted to specific tasks of human-robot interaction. Limitations and challenges are discussed to provide meaningful directions for future investigations.


Robotics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 102
Author(s):  
Gianpaolo Gulletta ◽  
Wolfram Erlhagen ◽  
Estela Bicho

In the last decade, the objectives outlined by the needs of personal robotics have led to the rise of new biologically-inspired techniques for arm motion planning. This paper presents a literature review of the most recent research on the generation of human-like arm movements in humanoid and manipulation robotic systems. Search methods and inclusion criteria are described. The studies are analyzed taking into consideration the sources of publication, the experimental settings, the type of movements, the technical approach, and the human motor principles that have been used to inspire and assess human-likeness. Results show that there is a strong focus on the generation of single-arm reaching movements and biomimetic-based methods. However, there has been poor attention to manipulation, obstacle-avoidance mechanisms, and dual-arm motion generation. For these reasons, human-like arm motion generation may not fully respect human behavioral and neurological key features and may result restricted to specific tasks of human-robot interaction. Limitations and challenges are discussed to provide meaningful directions for future investigations.


Author(s):  
Marko Wehle ◽  
Alexandra Weidemann ◽  
Ivo Wilhelm Boblan

Robotic developments are seen as a next level in technology with intelligent machines, which automate tedious tasks and serve our needs without complaints. But nevertheless, they have to be fair and smart enough to be intuitively of use and safe to handle. But how to implement this kind of intelligence, does it need feelings and emotions, should robots perceive the world as we do as a human role model, how far should the implementation of synthetic consciousness lead and actually, what is needed for consciousness in that context? Additionally in Human-Robot-Interaction research, science mainly makes use of the tool phenomenography, which is exclusively subjective, so how to make it qualify for Artificial Intelligence? These are the heading aspects of this chapter for conducting research in the field of social robotics and suggesting a conscious and cognitive model for smart and intuitive interacting robots, guided by biomimetics.


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.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 1063
Author(s):  
Eleni Vrochidou ◽  
Chris Lytridis ◽  
Christos Bazinas ◽  
George A. Papakostas ◽  
Hiroaki Wagatsuma ◽  
...  

Cyber-Physical System (CPS) applications including human-robot interaction call for automated reasoning for rational decision-making. In the latter context, typically, audio-visual signals are employed. Τhis work considers brain signals for emotion recognition towards an effective human-robot interaction. An ElectroEncephaloGraphy (EEG) signal here is represented by an Intervals’ Number (IN). An IN-based, optimizable parametric k Nearest Neighbor (kNN) classifier scheme for decision-making by fuzzy lattice reasoning (FLR) is proposed, where the conventional distance between two points is replaced by a fuzzy order function (σ) for reasoning-by-analogy. A main advantage of the employment of INs is that no ad hoc feature extraction is required since an IN may represent all-order data statistics, the latter are the features considered implicitly. Four different fuzzy order functions are employed in this work. Experimental results demonstrate comparably the good performance of the proposed techniques.


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