How Can Autonomous Vehicles Convey Emotions to Pedestrians? A Review of Emotionally Expressive Non-Humanoid Robots

In recent years, researchers and manufacturers have started to investigate ways to enable autonomous vehicles (AVs) to interact with nearby pedestrians in compensation for the absence of human drivers. The majority of these efforts focuses on external human–machine interfaces (eHMIs), using different modalities, such as light patterns or on-road projections, to communicate the AV’s intent and awareness. In this paper, we investigate the potential role of affective interfaces to convey emotions via eHMIs. To date, little is known about the role that affective interfaces can play in supporting AV–pedestrian interaction. However, emotions have been employed in many smaller social robots, from domestic companions to outdoor aerial robots in the form of drones. To develop a foundation for affective AV–pedestrian interfaces, we reviewed the emotional expressions of non-humanoid robots in 25 articles published between 2011 and 2021. Based on findings from the review, we present a set of considerations for designing affective AV–pedestrian interfaces and highlight avenues for investigating these opportunities in future studies.

Uncertainty Estimation of Dense Optical Flow for Robust Visual Navigation

This paper presents a novel dense optical-flow algorithm to solve the monocular simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) problem for ground or aerial robots. Dense optical flow can effectively provide the ego-motion of the vehicle while enabling collision avoidance with the potential obstacles. Existing research has not fully utilised the uncertainty of the optical flow—at most, an isotropic Gaussian density model has been used. We estimate the full uncertainty of the optical flow and propose a new eight-point algorithm based on the statistical Mahalanobis distance. Combined with the pose-graph optimisation, the proposed method demonstrates enhanced robustness and accuracy for the public autonomous car dataset (KITTI) and aerial monocular dataset.

MUSSOL: A Micro-Uas to Survey Ship Cargo hOLds

Because of their high maneuverability and fast deployment times, aerial robots have recently gained popularity for automating inspection tasks. In this paper, we address the visual inspection of vessel cargo holds, aiming at safer, cost-efficient and more intensive visual inspections of ships by means of a multirotor-type platform. To this end, the vehicle is equipped with a sensor suite able to supply the surveyor with imagery from relevant areas, while the control software is supporting the operator during flight with enhanced functionalities and reliable autonomy. All this has been accomplished in the context of the supervised autonomy (SA) paradigm, by means of extensive use of behaviour-based high-level control (including obstacle detection and collision prevention), all specifically devised for visual inspection. The full system has been evaluated both in laboratory and in real environments, on-board two different vessels. Results show the vehicle effective for the referred application, in particular due to the inspection-oriented capabilities it has been fitted with.

Efficient Design Principles for Designing Innovative Aerial Robots

The field of aerial robotics has advanced rapidly, but the design knowledge has not yet been codified into reusable design principles. Design principles have been developed for many other areas of mechanical design to both advance the field itself and help novice designers benefit from the past expert knowledge easier. We used an inductive approach and collected 90 aerial robot examples through the reviewing of recent work in aerial robotics and studying the key motivations, features, functionalities and potential design contradictions. Then, design principles are iteratively derived by identifying patterns and grouping them by the problem they solve, and the innovation made to solve it. From this, we find 35 unique design examples that can be grouped into either fourteen design principles for more sensing, battery, mission, or actuation efficient design; or six design principles to improve a desired functionality in an aerial robot such as reducing complexity or improving how the robot can interact with objects or its environment. We compared the research results with similar work in the area of mechanical design and examined the commonalities and highlighted design principles unique to aerial robots. The design principles presented in this research can support the design for future innovative aerial robots.