Are we living in a robot cargo cult?

Fernaeus, Ylva; Jacobsson, Mattias; Ljungblad, Sara; Holmquist, Lars Erik

doi:10.1145/1514095.1514175

Cited by 18 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 4 publications

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“…HRI is in its infancy and, like other digital technology advancements, easily catches the public eye. However, what we should avoid is what Fernaeus et al [33] considered to be a 'robot cargo cult' phenomena, where research claims or suggestions raise expectations beyond reasonable heights, influencing the social representations people/laymen have of the field, maybe, in unexpected and undesirable ways.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Helping robots imitate: Metrics and technological solutions inspired by human behaviour

Alissandrakis

Otero

Saunders³

2009

RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication

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Abstract-In this paper we describe three lines of research related to the issue of helping robots imitate people. These studies are based on observed human behaviour, technical metrics and implemented technical solutions. The three lines of research are: (a) a number of user studies that show how humans naturally tend to demonstrate a task for a robot to learn, (b) a formal approach to tackle the problem of what a robot should imitate, and (c) a technology-driven conceptual framework and technique, inspired by social learning theories, that addresses how a robot can be taught. In this merging exercise we will try to propose a way through this problem space, towards the design of a Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) system able to be taught by humans via demonstration.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

Helping robots imitate: Metrics and technological solutions inspired by human behaviour

Alissandrakis

Otero

Saunders³

2009

RO-MAN 2009 - The 18th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication

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“…In general, we believe that HRI researchers should avoid focusing primarily on pre-defined notions and visions of robots that may not be technically feasible [2]. Rather, it is important to find knowledge from the existing social reality and how people already are making use of technology.…”

Section: Speculative Ethics In Hrimentioning

confidence: 99%

Beyond speculative ethics in HRI?

Ljungblad

Nylander

Nørgaard

2011

Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction

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We discuss the difference between understanding robot ethics as something that is grounded in philosophical ideas about a potential future design, and understanding robot ethics as something that is grounded in empirical data. We argue, that understanding "robots" as a relatively homogenous group of designs for which we can formulate general ethics may lead to a foresight of future robot designs that includes ideas and concerns that are not feasible or realistic. Our aim is to exemplify a complementing perspective, by shedding light on two different robotic designs. We discuss their relation to specific use practices and user experiences, and provide some early ethical reflections and design concerns.

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“…Rather than exclusively focusing on improving robot object learning, task learning, and natural language understanding, we propose also designing interfaces that make up for low communication bandwidth by thoughtfully accounting for the constrained capabilities of robots [2].…”

Section: Research Problem and A Proposalmentioning

confidence: 99%

Help me help you: Interfaces for personal robots

Goodfellow¹,

Koenig²,

Muja³

et al. 2010

2010 5th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI)

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Index Terms-HRI, mobile user interface, information theory I. RESEARCH PROBLEM AND A PROPOSALThe communication bottleneck between robots and people [1] presents an enormous challenge to the human-robot interaction community. Rather than exclusively focusing on improving robot object learning, task learning, and natural language understanding, we propose also designing interfaces that make up for low communication bandwidth by thoughtfully accounting for the constrained capabilities of robots [2].People are adept at compensating for communication limitations, changing their communicative strategies for talking to pets, babies [3], foreigners [4], and robots [5]. Communicative accommodation already exists. Thus, instead of requiring robots to perfectly understand natural language, gestures, etc., there is a wide variety of research and design to be done in the space of alternative communicative modalities.We propose to approach this problem by accounting for limitations in robot abilities and taking advantage of already familiar human-computer interaction models, leveraging a communication model based upon Information Theory. Using this design perspective, we present three different mobile user interfaces that were fully developed and implemented on a PR2 (Personal Robot 2) [6] for task domains in navigation, perception, learning and manipulation. II. RELEVANT THEORIESWe can observe parallels between human robot interaction and the interaction between humans and general complex autonomous systems. Sheridan's taxonomy of complex human-machine systems describes the following sequence of operations: (1) acquire information, (2) analyze and display information, (3) decide on an action, and (4) implement that action [7, p. 61]. This provides the groundwork for identifying the stages at which people and/or robots should lead. In the current projects, the personal robot autonomously completes steps 1, 2 and 4, and the person completes step 3. Thus, the user interface design must address how the robot analyzes and displays its sensor information and world model to the human, and how the human can effectively communicate desired actions to the robot. An analysis of our case studies in Sheridan's framework is displayed in Fig. 1. All of our systems use the trading model of alternately passing control back and forth between human and robot, as opposed to the sharing model of simultaneous control described in [7, p. 63].Gold proposed using an Information Pipeline model for HRI that is based upon information theory [8], a mathematical model of communication developed for quantifying the amount of information that could be transported through a given channel. Schramm [9] developed a theory of communication that put these ideas into the context of two-way joint communications. This could be helpful when considering the large amount of overhead involved in encoding and decoding messages sent between people and robots.The focus of the projects in this paper was on designing interfaces that applied this theory to human-robot commun...

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Are we living in a robot cargo cult?

Cited by 18 publications

References 4 publications

Helping robots imitate: Metrics and technological solutions inspired by human behaviour

Helping robots imitate: Metrics and technological solutions inspired by human behaviour

Beyond speculative ethics in HRI?

Help me help you: Interfaces for personal robots

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