United States

We propose a novel on-line multi-UAV coverage path planning method for 3D reconstruction. UAVs play ho- mogeneous roles in most existing multi-UAV path planning methods, where their flexibility is not fully exploited. The fact that UAVs can explore with different missions and strategies at different heights simultaneously is not well considered. Therefore, we give UAVs different identities by presenting a global-local pattern, where global UAV locates the interesting regions while local UAV explores these regions in succession. Leveraging the mechanism of sensorimotor coordination, our strategy adjusts the paths of local UAV on-line according to the input from global UAV in order to gather more information and save time. In addition, our method is compatible with real-time SLAM systems. Simulation shows that our strategy takes less time than other strategies based on area-division, and indicates that it gathers more information for better reconstruction.

IEEE RO-MAN 2024

Sensorimotor Coordinated Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning

sensorimotor coordination

multi-uav

coverage path planning

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The 9th annual workshop on Naval Applications of Machine Learning is an opportunity for researchers from Navy research and development centers and our partner organizations to exchange technical ideas and to come together as a team. The goals of NAML are to spread awareness of current machine learning research relevant to Naval applications, to connect machine learning researchers with experts in military requirements and to build and strengthen collaborations within the defense research community.

technical paper

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Dear Colleagues and Friends,

The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, IEEE RO-MAN 2024, was held at Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, USA.

The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was **“Embracing Human-Centered HRI”**.

With the continuous technological effort of understanding human needs, creating human-desired robotic systems, and developing real human user experiences, we are marching together towards building a promising and excellent human quality of life, all for our wellness and our next generation.

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The 33rd IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication was held in Pasadena, California, USA. The theme of the IEEE RO-MAN 2024 was “Embracing Human-Centered HRI”.

It is essentially required to predict the ball's flight trajectory accurately and timely for a robotic table tennis ball bouncing task. Existing solutions, which can be categorized into model-based and learning-based groups, both exhibits unpleasant disadvantages. For example, they often require to identify many dynamic parameters accurately or to collect extensive labeled data, which are generally very difficult or costly to achieve in real world. In this paper, we proposed a light-wight and rapid trajectory prediction approach for online table tennis bouncing tasks based on a simplified model. In the proposed approach, the ball's flight poses are captured and estimated by a low-cost RGB-D camera. Then the ball's landing position is predicted in advance by using a fitted 3D parabola. Compared with existing solutions, our proposed approach is lightweight and easy to deploy. In experiments, 66 flight trajectories of the ball are collected to serve as benchmark. The prediction errors for all landing positions are all less than 20mm, in which most of them are less than 10mm. In addition, the prediction can be achieved 141.7ms in advance, which is fast enough for the robotic arm to plan and move itself to the predicted landing point.

A Light-Weight and Rapid Table Tennis Ball Trajectory Prediction Approaches towards Online Bouncing Task

There is an interest in and need for the use of semiautonomous robots in various fields, such as disaster response. Over the years, different techniques for semiautonomous control were developed, ranging from teleoperation guidance to different user interface designs for setting task constraints and goals interactively. Among those, affordance templates emerged as a recent method for users to efficiently provide robots with contextual information about object shapes, properties, and affordances. In many fields where direct teleoperation is common, affordance templates seem to be a promising candidate for improving performance and usability. However, despite the reports on the potential benefits of this technique in comparison to direct teleoperation, they are often qualitative or focus on tasks where teleoperation is particularly challenging. This can be a problem because task difficulty can influence different performance metrics and human factors, so results from studies that show large differences in task difficulty between interaction modes cannot be directly generalized to tasks with smaller or non-existent differences in difficulty. In this study, we aim to evaluate the effectiveness of affordance templates in the context of debris removal for disaster response, a task where direct teleoperation is a viable technique. We compared the two methods in a simulated setting through a user study involving 41 participants by measuring a) usability through questionnaires and b) performance on secondary tasks, an established measure of spare information processing capacity. The study results show that despite similar difficulty, users performed better on secondary tasks when using affordance template-based semiautonomy in this setting.

An Evaluation of Affordance Templates for Human-Robot Interaction

Haptic feedback is essential for humans to successfully perform complex and delicate manipulation tasks. A recent rise in tactile sensors has enabled robots to leverage the sense of touch and expand their capability drastically. However, many tasks still need human intervention/guidance. For this reason, we present a teleoperation framework designed to provide haptic feedback to human operators based on the data from camera-based tactile sensors mounted on the robot gripper. Partial autonomy is introduced to prevent slippage of grasped objects during task execution. Notably, we rely exclusively on low-cost off-the-shelf hardware to realize an affordable solution. We demonstrate the versatility of the framework on nine different objects ranging from rigid to soft and fragile ones, using three different operators on real hardware.

Low-Cost Teleoperation with Haptic Feedback through Vision-Based Tactile Sensors for Rigid and Soft Object Manipulation

Autonomous Guided Vehicles (AGVs) are becoming increasingly common in industrial environments to transport heavy equipment around warehouses. Within the idea of Industry 5.0, these AGVs are expected to work alongside humans in the same shared workspace. To enable smooth and trustworthy interaction between workers and AGVs, the AGVs must be able to model the workers' behavior and plan their trajectories around it. In this paper, we introduce a Finite Automaton Model (FAM) to model worker walking behavior in such a context. We conduct a human subject experiment using a Virtual Reality (VR) environment to collect data about worker trajectories to tune our model. We show that not only is our model more interpretable, but also outperforms machine learning models at classifying worker behavior with limited training data. Future research can use our model to modify AGV behavior to promote trustworthy human-AGV interaction.

Identifying Worker Motion Through a Manufacturing Plant: A Finite Automaton Model

Prior research on the fear of robots in blue-collar workplaces shows that perception is influenced by minority status, education level, job domains, age, and location. However, the perception of robots is not universally negative, as workers exhibit positive views when robots can improve safety, enhance existing skills, or take over less desirable tasks. Currently, a gap exists on the types of barriers to safety that a worker faces or how the job context, e.g. hours spent in heavy lifts, or demographics, e.g. weight or height, contribute to perceptions of safety, need for and type of assistance from a co-worker, and perception of an assistive robot. Through a survey of 530 blue-collar workers, we find that 85% of the barriers to safety are physical, psychological, and a combination of physical and psychological factors. Our survey shows that the time spent in performing heavy lifts is a significant predictor for barriers to safety, while the interaction between weight and time is a marginal predictor. We find that the barriers to safety significantly influence perception of job longevity. We find the worker's height is a significant predictor to comfort levels in receiving assistance from co-workers, while weight and the interaction between height and weight are marginally significant. We find that the worker's weight and hours spent in lifting are significant predictors for the type of assistance expected. Our findings show that the number of hours spent in lifting is a significant predictor on the type of robotic assistance expected. Based on our results, collaborative robots should be designed to show awareness of physical and physiological needs and cognizance to the worker's physical traits, as well as the amount of time the worker has spent on lifting tasks.

Analyzing Perceptions on Barriers to Safety in the Workforce and Expectations on Human and Robotic Assistance

Industry 5.0 signifies a transformative era where humans and robots collaborate closely, leading to advancements in manufacturing efficiency and personalization. In light of this, it becomes essential to assess the robots trustworthiness to ensure a secure environment and equitable workload distribution. The majority of trust assessments hinge on post-hoc questionnaires for the extent of trust experienced during the interaction. A data-driven approach is required to promptly assess trust levels in real-time, allowing for the adjustment of robot behavior to align with human needs. The paper proposes a chemical industry scenario where a robot assisted a human in the process of mixing chemicals. Several machine learning models, including deep learning, were developed using body motion data to categorize the level of trust exhibited by the human operator. The models achieve an accuracy exceeding 90%. The results clearly show the feasibility of data-driven trust assessment.

A Data-Driven Approach Utilizing Body Motion Data for Trust Evaluation in Industrial Human-Robot Collaboration

The rise of automation has provided an opportunity to achieve higher efficiency in manufacturing processes, yet it often compromises the flexibility required to promptly respond to evolving market needs and meet the demand for customization. Human-robot collaboration attempts to tackle these challenges by combining the strength and precision of machines with human ingenuity and perceptual understanding. In this paper, we conceptualize and propose an implementation framework for an autonomous, machine learning-based manipulator that incorporates human-in-the-loop principles and leverages Extended Reality (XR) to facilitate intuitive communication and programming between humans and robots. Furthermore, the conceptual framework foresees human involvement directly in the robot learning process, resulting in higher adaptability and task generalization. The paper highlights key technologies enabling the proposed framework, emphasizing the importance of developing the digital ecosystem as a whole. Additionally, we review the existent implementation approaches of XR in human-robot collaboration, showcasing diverse perspectives and methodologies. The challenges and future outlooks are discussed, delving into the major obstacles and potential research avenues of XR for more natural human-robot interaction and integration in the industrial landscape.

Extended Reality for Enhanced Human-Robot Collaboration: A Human-In-The-Loop Approach

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm in complex and continuous robotic tasks, however, safe exploration has been one of the main challenges, especially in contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments. Focusing on this issue, we propose SRL-VIC: a model-free safe
RL framework combined with a variable impedance controller(VIC). Specifically, safety critic and recovery policy networks are pre-trained where safety critic evaluates the safety of the next action using a risk value before it is executed and the recovery policy suggests a corrective action if the risk value is high. Furthermore,
the policies are updated online where the task policy not only achieves the task but also modulates the stiffness parameters to keep a safe and compliant profile. A set of experiments in contact-rich maze tasks demonstrate that our framework outperforms the baselines (without the recovery mechanism and without the VIC),
yielding a good trade-off between efficient task accomplishment and safety guarantee. We show our policy trained on simulation can be deployed on a physical robot without fine-tuning, achieving successful task completion with robustness and generalization.
![](https://assets.underline.io/markdown_image/1/image/58c7cca8c3f39be1154b02ffb93c41f7.png)

SRL-VIC: A Variable Stiffness-based Safe Reinforcement Learning for Contact-rich Robotic Tasks

As robots are increasingly integrated into various aspects of everyday life, it becomes essential to develop intelligent systems capable of providing assistance while maintaining social appropriateness. In this paper, we challenge the prevailing assumption that robots should always offer help, prompting an essential discussion of when robots should offer help. We present a systematic way of considering socially appropriate assistance in human-robot interaction and introduce a theoretical framework that enables robots to discern whether or not to offer help to a human user. We examine the factors that influence the social appropriateness of help, including the relative skill levels between the robot and user and measures for assessing the social value and cost of help. Through a series of illustrative examples, we demonstrate the feasibility of our framework in providing socially appropriate assistance.

Should I Help?: A Skill-Based Framework for Deciding Socially Appropriate Assistance in Human-Robot Interactions

This paper introduces a novel methodology for the partitioning of the social space associated with arbitrary groups of individuals into approachable regions. The proposed method exploits boundary points within pre-identified social spaces and classifies them into three distinct levels based on the field of view between pairs of individuals within the group. The effectiveness of this approach was rigorously assessed across both static and dynamic scenarios, illustrating successful segmentation and classification of approachable regions. Furthermore, the methodology underwent comprehensive testing using publicly available datasets, yielding consistently satisfactory outcomes. This innovative approach represents a substantial contribution to the field of human-robot interaction, showcasing significant potential for future enhancements and advancements.

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A Light-Weight and Rapid Table Tennis Ball Trajectory Prediction Approaches towards Online Bouncing Task

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