Ambiguity and noise in natural language instructions create a significant barrier towards adopting autonomous systems into safety critical workflows involving humans and machines. In this paper, we propose to build on recent advances in electrophysiological monitoring methods and augmented reality technologies, to develop alternative modes of communication between humans and robots involved in large-scale proximal collaborative tasks. We will first introduce augmented reality techniques for projecting a robot's intentions to its human teammate, who can interact with these cues to engage in real-time collaborative plan execution with the robot. We will then look at how electroencephalographic (EEG) feedback can be used to monitor human response to both discrete events, as well as longer term affective states while execution of a plan. These signals can be used by a learning agent, a.k.a an affective robot, to modify its policy. We will present an end-to-end system capable of demonstrating these modalities of interaction. We hope that the proposed system will inspire research in augmenting human-robot interactions with alternative forms of communications in the interests of safety, productivity, and fluency of teaming, particularly in engineered settings such as the factory floor or the assembly line in the manufacturing industry where the use of such wearables can be enforced.
Alternative Interfaces for Human-initiated Natural Language Communication and Robot-initiated Haptic Feedback: Towards Better Situational Awareness in Human-Robot Collaboration
From Canada to Japan: How 10,000 km Affect User Perception in Robot Teleoperation
Interactive Robotics Lab, Tokyo University of Science（东京科学大学交互机器人实验室）；Active and Interactive Robotics Lab, University of Waterloo（滑铁卢大学主动与交互机器人实验室）；Kawada Technologies, Inc.（Kawada技术公司）
Cable-driven Continuum Robotics: Proprioception via Proximal-integrated Force Sensing
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；T Stone Robotics Institute（T Stone机器人研究所）；Department of Mechanical and Automation Engineering（机械与自动化工程系）；Shun Hing Institute of Advanced Engineering（顺兴先进工程研究院）；Multi-Scale Medical Robotics Center（多尺度医疗机器人中心）；Curve Robotics Limited（Curve机器人有限公司）
Proximal Control of UAVs with Federated Learning for Human-Robot Collaborative Domains
Lab of Systems Engineering and Robotics (LASER), Department of Computer Systems, Universidade Federal da Paraiba（系统工程与机器人实验室（LASER），计算机系统系，巴伊帕巴联邦大学）；Department of Cybernetics, Czech Technical University in Prague（控制论系，布拉格捷克技术大学）
Robot Pouring: Identifying Causes of Spillage and Selecting Alternative Action Parameters Using Probabilistic Actual Causation
Cognitive Neuroinformatics University of Bremen（认知神经信息学不列颠群岛大学）；University of Bremen（不列颠群岛大学）；Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology - BIPS（莱比锡预防研究与流行病学研究所 - BIPS）
Domain-Adaptive Communication-Rate Optimization for Sim-to-Real Humanoid-Robot Wireless XR Teleoperation
Cooperative Medianet Innovation Center（协作中位网创新中心）；School of Information Science and Electronic Engineering（信息科学与电子工程学院）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）
