So-called collaborative robots are a current trend in industrial robotics. However, they still face many problems in practical application such as reduced speed to ascertain their collaborativeness. The standards prescribe two regimes: (i) speed and separation monitoring and (ii) power and force limiting, where the former requires reliable estimation of distances between the robot and human body parts and the latter imposes constraints on the energy absorbed during collisions prior to robot stopping. Following the standards, we deploy the two collaborative regimes in a single application and study the performance in a mock collaborative task under the individual regimes, including transitions between them. Additionally, we compare the performance under "safety zone monitoring" with keypoint pair-wise separation distance assessment relying on an RGB-D sensor and skeleton extraction algorithm to track human body parts in the workspace. Best performance has been achieved in the following setting: robot operates at full speed until a distance threshold between any robot and human body part is crossed; then, reduced robot speed per power and force limiting is triggered. Robot is halted only when the operator's head crosses a predefined distance from selected robot parts. We demonstrate our methodology on a setup combining a KUKA LBR iiwa robot, Intel RealSense RGB-D sensor and OpenPose for human pose estimation.
LiHRA: A LiDAR-Based HRI Dataset for Automated Risk Monitoring Methods
Proximity Robotics & Automation GmbH（近距机器人与自动化有限公司）；Institute of Industrial Automation and Software Engineering, University of Stuttgart（工业自动化与软件工程学院，斯图加特大学）
University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）
As autonomous machines such as robots and vehicles start performing tasks involving human users, ensuring a safe interaction between them becomes an important issue. Translating methods from human-robot interaction (HRI) studies to the interaction between humans and other highly complex machines (e.g. semi-autonomous vehicles) could help advance the use of those machines in scenarios requiring human interaction. One method involves understanding human intentions and decision-making to estimate the human's present and near-future actions whilst interacting with a robot. This idea originates fro…
Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the general public. The growing field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies various aspects of this scenario - from social norms to joint action to human-robot teams and more. Researchers in HRI have made great strides in developing models, methods, and algorithms for robots acting with and around humans, but these "computational HRI" models and algorithms generall…
Toward an Interaction-Centered Approach to Robot Trustworthiness
CONTACT, Italian Institute of Technology, Genoa, Italy and Digital Health Department, Nvision Systems & Technologies, S.L., Barcelona, Spain（意大利理工学院（CONTACT）、西班牙巴塞罗那Nvision系统与技术公司数字健康部）；Department of Informatics, University of Hamburg, Germany（德国汉堡大学信息学院）；Department of Applied Informatics, Comenius University Bratislava, Slovakia（斯洛伐克布拉迪斯拉发Comenius大学应用信息学院）
Why did My Robot Just Change Personality? Prompting Guidelines for a Grounded Robot Persona in LLM-Based HRI
RPTU Kaiserslautern（凯泽斯劳滕工业大学）；Linköping University（林雪平大学）；University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）；University of Naples Federico II（那不勒斯费德里科二世大学）；Ben-Gurion University of the Negev（本-古里安大学内盖夫分校）；The Azrieli National Center for Autism and Neurodevelopment Research（阿兹列利国家自闭症与神经发育研究中心）
The interaction of humans and robots in less constrained environments gains a lot of attention lately and the safety of such interaction is of utmost importance. Two ways of risk assessment are prescribed by recent safety standards: (i) power and force limiting and (ii) speed and separation monitoring. Unlike typical solutions in the industry that are restricted to mere safety zone monitoring, we present a framework that realizes separation distance monitoring between a robot and a human operator in a detailed, yet versatile, transparent, and tunable fashion. The separation distance is assesse…
Reframing Human-Robot Interaction Through Extended Reality: Unlocking Safer, Smarter, and More Empathic Interactions with Virtual Robots and Foundation Models
Division of Robotics, Perception, and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology（KTH皇家理工学院机器人、感知与学习部）；Department of Clinical Medicine, University of Bergen（卑尔根大学临床医学系）
School of Computing Science（计算机科学学院）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；Edinburgh Centre for Robotics（爱丁堡机器人中心）；Heriot-Watt University（赫瑞瓦特大学）
This paper describes a new research project that aims to develop a social robot designed to help children cope with painful and distressing medical procedures in a clinical setting. While robots have previously been trialled for this task, with promising initial results, the systems have tended to be teleoperated, limiting their flexibility and robustness. This project will use epistemic planning techniques as a core component for action selection in the robot system, in order to generate plans that include physical, sensory, and social actions for interacting with humans. The robot will opera…
Human-robot interaction (HRI) is an important component to improve the flexibility of modern production lines. However, in real-world applications, the task (\ie the conditions that the robot needs to operate on, such as the environmental lighting condition, the human subjects to interact with, and the hardware platforms) may vary and it remains challenging to optimally and efficiently configure and adapt the robotic system under these changing tasks. To address the challenge, this paper proposes a task-agnostic adaptable controller that can 1) adapt to different lighting conditions, 2) adapt …
There are many examples of cases where access to improved models of human behavior and cognition has allowed creation of robots which can better interact with humans, and not least in road vehicle automation this is a rapidly growing area of research. Human-robot interaction (HRI) therefore provides an important applied setting for human behavior modeling - but given the vast complexity of human behavior, how complete and accurate do these models need to be? Here, we outline some possible ways of thinking about this problem, starting from the suggestion that modelers need to keep the right end…
Bristol Robotics Laboratory（布里斯托尔机器人实验室）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；University of Bristol（布里斯托尔大学）
We present an approach for the verification and validation (V&V) of robot assistants in the context of human-robot interactions (HRI), 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 …
University of Hertfordshire（赫特福德大学）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
A solid methodology to understand human perception and preferences in human-robot interaction (HRI) is crucial in designing real-world HRI. Social cognition posits that the dimensions Warmth and Competence are central and universal dimensions characterizing other humans. The Robotic Social Attribute Scale (RoSAS) proposes items for those dimensions suitable for HRI and validated them in a visual observation study. In this paper we complement the validation by showing the usability of these dimensions in a behavior based, physical HRI study with a fully autonomous robot. We compare the findings…
Recent advances in the areas of human-robot interaction (HRI) and robot autonomy are changing the world. Today robots are used in a variety of applications. People and robots work together in human autonomous teams (HATs) to accomplish tasks that, separately, cannot be easily accomplished. Trust between robots and humans in HATs is vital to task completion and effective team cohesion. For optimal performance and safety of human operators in HRI, human trust should be adjusted to the actual performance and reliability of the robotic system. The cost of poor trust calibration in HRI, is at a min…
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
As autonomous systems begin to operate amongst humans, methods for safe interaction must be investigated. We consider an example of a small autonomous vehicle in a pedestrian zone that must safely maneuver around people in a free-form fashion. We investigate two key questions: How can we effectively integrate pedestrian intent estimation into our autonomous stack. Can we develop an online monitoring framework to give formal guarantees on the safety of such human-robot interactions. We present a pedestrian intent estimation framework that can accurately predict future pedestrian trajectories gi…
Human-robot collaboration including close physical human-robot interaction (pHRI) is a current trend in industry and also science. The safety guidelines prescribe two modes of safety: (i) power and force limitation and (ii) speed and separation monitoring. We examine the potential of robots equipped with artificial sensitive skin and a protective safety zone around it (peripersonal space) to safe pHRI.
Industrial standards define safety requirements for Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) in industrial manufacturing. The standards particularly require real-time monitoring and securing of the minimum protective distance between a robot and an operator. In this work, we propose a depth-sensor based model for workspace monitoring and an interactive Augmented Reality (AR) User Interface (UI) for safe HRC. The AR UI is implemented on two different hardware: a projector-mirror setup anda wearable AR gear (HoloLens). We experiment the workspace model and UIs for a realistic diesel motor assembly task. …
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
Industries such as flexible manufacturing and home care will be transformed by the presence of robotic assistants. Assurance of safety and functional soundness for these robotic systems will require rigorous verification and validation. We propose testing in simulation using Coverage-Driven Verification (CDV) to guide the testing process in an automatic and systematic way. We use a two-tiered test generation approach, where abstract test sequences are computed first and then concretized (e.g., data and variables are instantiated), to reduce the complexity of the test generation problem. To dem…
University of Bristol（布里斯托大学）；University of the West of England（西英格兰大学）
The software of robotic assistants needs to be verified, to ensure its safety and functional correctness. Testing in simulation allows a high degree of realism in the verification. However, generating tests that cover both interesting foreseen and unforeseen scenarios in human-robot interaction (HRI) tasks, while executing most of the code, remains a challenge. We propose the use of belief-desire-intention (BDI) agents in the test environment, to increase the level of realism and human-like stimulation of simulated robots. Artificial intelligence, such as agent theory, can be exploited for mor…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；American High School（美国高中）；The Harker School（哈克学校）
In order to collaborate safely and efficiently, robots need to anticipate how their human partners will behave. Some of today's robots model humans as if they were also robots, and assume users are always optimal. Other robots account for human limitations, and relax this assumption so that the human is noisily rational. Both of these models make sense when the human receives deterministic rewards: i.e., gaining either $100 or $130 with certainty. But in real world scenarios, rewards are rarely deterministic. Instead, we must make choices subject to risk and uncertainty--and in these settings,…
Jointly achieving safety and efficiency in human-robot interaction (HRI) settings is a challenging problem, as the robot's planning objectives may be at odds with the human's own intent and expectations. Recent approaches ensure safe robot operation in uncertain environments through a supervisory control scheme, sometimes called "shielding", which overrides the robot's nominal plan with a safety fallback strategy when a safety-critical event is imminent. These reactive "last-resort" strategies (typically in the form of aggressive emergency maneuvers) focus on preserving safety without efficien…
This paper introduces the notion of danger awareness in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), which decodes whether a human is aware of the existence of the robot, and illuminates whether the human is willing to engage in enforcing the safety. This paper also proposes a method to quantify this notion as a single binary variable, so-called danger awareness coefficient. By analyzing the effect of this coefficient on the human's actions, an online Bayesian learning method is proposed to update the belief about the value of the coefficient. It is shown that based upon the danger awareness …
Human safety is the most important demand for human robot interaction and collaboration (HRIC), which not only refers to physical safety, but also includes psychological safety. Although many robots with different configurations have entered our living and working environments, the human safety problem is still an ongoing research problem in human-robot coexistence scenarios. This paper addresses the human safety issue by covering both the physical safety and psychological safety aspects. First, we introduce an adaptive robot velocity control and step size adjustment method according to human …
Collision avoidance requires tradeoffs in planning time horizons. Depending on the planner, safety cannot always be guaranteed in uncertain environments given map updates. To mitigate situations where the planner leads the vehicle into a state of collision or the vehicle reaches a point where no trajectories are feasible, we propose a continuous collision checking algorithm. The imminent collision checking system continuously monitors vehicle safety, and plans a safe trajectory that leads the vehicle to a stop within the observed map. We test our proposed pipeline alongside a teleoperated navi…
Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has enabled procedures with increased precision and dexterity, but surgical robots are still open loop and require surgeons to work with a tele-operation console providing only limited visual feedback. In this setting, mechanical failures, software faults, or human errors might lead to adverse events resulting in patient complications or fatalities. We argue that impending adverse events could be detected and mitigated by applying context-specific safety constraints on the motions of the robot. We present a context-aware safety monitoring syste…
Fraunhofer IOSB（弗劳恩霍夫IOSB研究所）；Fraunhofer Institute of Optronics, System Technologies and Image Exploitation（弗劳恩霍夫光电、系统技术与图像开发研究所）
In order to enable physical human-robot interaction where humans and (mobile) manipulators share their workspace and work together, robots have to be equipped with important capabilities to guarantee human safety. The robots have to recognize possible collisions with the human co-worker and react anticipatorily by adapting their motion to avert dangerous situations while they are executing their task. Therefore, methods have been developed that allow to monitor the workspace of mobile manipulators using multiple depth sensors to gather information about the robot environment. This encompasses …
