Spain

Milgram&#39;s reality-virtuality continuum applies to interaction in the physical space dimension, going from real to virtual. However, interaction has a social dimension as well, that can go from real to artificial depending on the companion with whom the user interacts. In this paper we present our vision of the Reality-Artificiality bidimensional Continuum (RAC), we identify some challenges in its design and development and we discuss how reliable interactions might be supported inside RAC.

ECAI 2020

Engineering Reliable Interactions in the Reality-Artificiality Continuum

**31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication**
 This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.
 
 The conference covers a wide range of topics related to Robot and Human Interactive Communication, involving theories, methodologies, technologies, empirical and experimental studies. Papers related to the study of robotic technology, psychology, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, human factors, ethics and policies, interaction-based robot design and other topics related to human-robot interaction are welcome.
 
 **CONFERENCE THEME:**
 Social, asocial, and antisocial robots
 
 Robots are starting to populate our lives: at work, in our homes, hotels, shops. However, not everybody is comfortable with robots finding a place in society. For example, people may be afraid that robots will replace humans in their jobs. This belief is exacerbated by the media that, on one side, raise expectations of robots’ capabilities, while amplifying fears and worries on the other side.
 
 In the next years, due to the increasing request for interaction with people in social environments, academic research and market analyses predict that robots will become more and more “social”. But, at the same time, robots may incur the risk of being perceived as “asocial” as their pervasiveness in everyday environments may become an obstacle to social interaction between humans. Or they may even be rejected as “antisocial” if researchers do not take care to develop robots that behave according to the customs and habits of the communities where they are expected to operate.
 
 To prevent this from happening, robotic researchers can no longer take the luxury of being mere technicians. They must be capable of addressing all the challenges raised by future robot-populated communities in a multidisciplinary way. They need to share their knowledge with the public to make people aware of what robots really are, what expectations we can have from them, the risks we may incur, and the possible mitigation plans.
 
 While being open to any kind of contribution related to Human-Robot Interactive Communication, the RO-MAN 2022 conference will emphasize these aspects of robotic research. How can we create robots capable of being welcomed as our assistants and companions in society while, at the same time, not being perceived as “asocial” or “antisocial?” How can we create robots perceived as facilitators of the natural development of human beings and communities, rather than obstacles?
 
 Contributions from different disciplines, not exclusively related to technological development, will be welcomed as crucial to pave the way to global acceptance of future robots with an informed attitude.
 
 [![](https://assets.underline.io/uploads/markdown_image/1/image/af259abe105b3791c498ae1552d75710.png)](https://drive.google.com/file/d/18w73BZPB_JVOgcrcdZDqYpEupwVt4CnU/view?usp=sharing)

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IEEE RO-MAN 2022

31st IEEE International Conference on Robot & Human Interactive Communication
This conference is a leading forum where state-of-the-art innovative results, the latest developments as well as future perspectives relating to robot and human interactive communication are presented and discussed.

Milgram's reality-virtuality continuum applies to interaction in the physical space dimension, going from real to virtual. However, interaction has a social dimension as well, that can go from real to artificial depending on the companion with whom the user interacts. In this paper we present our vision of the Reality-Artificiality bidimensional Continuum (RAC), we identify some challenges in its design and development and we discuss how reliable interactions might be supported inside RAC.

technical paper

ECAI2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI, including:




**An extensive programme of workshops, tutorials, and invited speakers**

**The Prestigious Applications of Intelligent Systems conference (PAIS)**

**The Frontiers in AI track sessions**

**The Lab To Market event**

**The Women in AI time**

**The EU Challenges forum**

… and many more!

ECAI 2020 featured a full programme of technical papers, as well as many AI-related events of interest for researchers, students and all attendants who are interested on contemporary AI.

"Robots are often so complex that one person may not know all the ins and outs of the system. Inheriting software and hardware infrastructure with limited documentation and/or practical robot experience presents a costly challenge for an engineer or researcher.  The choice is to either re-build existing systems, or invest in learning the existing framework. No matter the choice, a reliable system which produces expected outcomes is necessary, and while rebuilding may at first appear easier than learning the system, future users will be faced with the same choice. This paper provides a method to allow for increased documentation of the robotic system, which in turn can be used to contribute in overall robot reliability.
To do this we propose the identification of a robot's core behaviors for use in Capability Analysis Tables (CATs).  CATs are a form of tabular documentation that connect the hardware and software inputs and outputs to the robot's core behaviors.  Unlike existing methods, CATs are flexible, easy to build, and understandable by non-expert robot users. We demonstrate this documentation method with an experimental example using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). "

Establishing Reliable Robot Behavior using Capability Analysis Tables

Long-term autonomy requires autonomous systems to adapt as their capabilities no longer perform as expected. To achieve this, a system must first be capable of detecting such changes. In this position paper presentation, we describe a system architecture for BDI autonomous agents capable of adapting to changes in a dynamic environment and outline the required research.

Adaptable and Verifiable BDI Reasoning

The main purpose of this work is to explore and investigate the main challenges that arise when we want to handle percepts and control the actuators of a robot with agent-oriented abstractions. In particular, the presentation focuses on how to program an autonomous robot with Jadescript.

Exploratory Experiments on Programming Autonomous Robots in Jadescript

Robots are soon going to be deployed in non-industrial environments. Before society can take such a step, it is necessary to endow complex robotic systems with mechanisms that make them reliable enough to operate in situations where the human factor is predominant. This calls for the development of robotic frameworks that can soundly guarantee that a collection of properties are verified at all times during operation. While developing a mission plan, robots should take into account factors such as human physiology. In this paper, we present an example of how a robotic application that involves human interaction can be modeled through hybrid automata, and analyzed by using statistical model-checking. We exploit statistical techniques to determine the probability with which some properties are verified, thus easing the state-space explosion problem. The analysis is performed using the Uppaal tool. In addition, we used Uppaal to run simulations that allowed us to show non-trivial time dynamics that describe the behavior of the real system, including human-related variables. Overall, this process allows developers to gain useful insights into their application and to make decisions about how to improve it to balance efficiency and user satisfaction.

Statistical Model Checking of Human-Robot Interaction Scenarios

Semi-supervised learning improves the performance of supervised machine learning by leveraging methods  from  unsupervised  learning  to  extract  information  not  explicitly  available  in  the  labels.Through the design of a system that enables a robot to learn inspection strategies from a human operator, we present a hybrid semi-supervised system capable of learning interpretable and verifiable models from demonstrations.  The system induces a controller program by learning from immersive demonstrations using sequential importance sampling.  These visual servo controllers are parametrised  by  proportional  gains  and  are  visually  verifiable  through  observation  of  the  robot’s position in the environment.  Clustering and effective particle size filtering allows the system to dis-cover goals in the state space. These goals are used to label the original demonstration for end-to-end learning of behavioural models.  The behavioural models are used for autonomous model predictive control and scrutinised for explanations. We implement causal sensitivity analysis to identify salient objects and generate counterfactual conditional explanations. These features enable decision making interpretation and post hoc discovery of the causes of a failure.  The proposed system expands on previous approaches to program synthesis by incorporating repellers in the attribution prior of the sampling process.  We successfully learn the hybrid system from an inspection scenario where an unmanned ground vehicle has to inspect, in a specific order, different areas of the environment. The system induces an interpretable computer program of the demonstration that can be synthesised to produce novel inspection behaviours.  Importantly, the robot successfully runs the synthesised pro-gram on an unseen configuration of the environment while presenting explanations of its autonomous behaviour.

Semi-supervised Learning From Demonstration Through Program Synthesis: An Inspection Robot Case Study

Automated machine learning (AutoML) systems aim at finding the best machine learning (ML) pipeline that automatically matches the task and data at hand. We investigate the robustness of machine learning pipelines generated with three AutoML systems, TPOT, H2O, and AutoKeras. In particular, we study the influence of dirty data on accuracy, and consider how using dirty training data may help create more robust solutions. Furthermore, we also analyze how the structure of the generated pipelines differs in different cases.

Testing the Robustness of AutoML Systems

"Human-Robot Collaboration (HRC) is rapidly replacing the traditional application of robotics in the manufacturing industry. Robots and human operators no longer have to perform their tasks in segregated areas and are capable of working in close vicinity and performing hybrid tasks---performed partially by humans and by robots.

We have presented a methodology in an earlier work to promote and facilitate formally modeling HRC systems, which are notoriously safety-critical. Relying on temporal logic modeling capabilities and automated model checking tools, we built a framework to formally model HRC systems and verify the physical safety of human operator against ISO 10218-2 standard. In order to make our proposed formal verification framework more appealing to safety engineers, whom are usually not very fond of formal modeling and verification techniques, we decided to couple our model checking approach with a 3D simulator that demonstrates the potential hazardous situations to the safety engineers in a more transparent way. This paper reports our co-simulation approach, using Morse simulator and Zot model checker."

Co-Simulation of Human-Robot Collaboration: from Temporal Logic to 3D Simulation

Given the complexity of real-world, unstructured domains, it is often impossible or impractical to design models that include every feature needed to handle all possible scenarios that an autonomous system may encounter. For an autonomous system to be reliable in such domains, it should have the ability to improve its competence online. In this paper, we propose a method for improving the competence of a system over the course of its deployment. We specifically focus on a class of semi-autonomous systems known as competence-aware systems that model their own competence---the optimal extent of autonomy to use in any given situation---and learn this competence over time from feedback received through interactions with a human authority. Our method exploits such feedback to identify important state features missing from the system's initial model, and incorporates them into its state representation. The result is an agent that better predicts human involvement, leading to improvements in its competence and reliability, and as a result, its overall performance.

Improving Competence for Reliable Autonomy

"Autonomous systems developed with the Belief-Desire-Intention (BDI) architecture are usually mostly implemented in simulated environments. In this project we sought to build a BDI agent for use in the real world for campus mail delivery in the tunnel system at Carleton University.  Ideally, the robot should receive a delivery order via a mobile application, pick up the mail at a station, navigate the tunnels to the destination station, and notify the recipient. We linked the Robot Operating System (ROS) with a BDI reasoning system to achieve a subset of the required use cases. ROS handles the low-level sensing and actuation, while the BDI reasoning system handles the high-level reasoning and decision making. Sensory data is orchestrated and sent from ROS to the reasoning system as perceptions. These perceptions are then deliberated upon, and an action string is sent back to ROS for interpretation and driving of the necessary actuator for the action to be performed.

In this paper we present our current implementation, which closes the loop on the hardware-software integration, and implements a subset of the use cases required for the full system."

Toward Campus Mail Delivery using BDI

Knowing when a driver will quit cruising and either leave the area or park at an expensive off-street facility is critical for modeling parking search. We employ a serious game – PARKGAME for estimating the dynamics of drivers’ decision making. 49 Participants of a game experiment were involved in three scenarios where they had to arrive on time to a fictional appointment or face monetary penalties, and to choose between uncertain but cheap on-street parking or a certain but costly parking lot. Scenarios diverged on the time to appointment and distance between the meeting place and parking lot locations. Players played a series of 8 or 16 computer games on a Manhattan grid road network with high on-street parking occupancy and nearby parking lot of unlimited capacity. Players’ choices to quit or to continue search, as dependent on the search time, were analyzed with an accelerated-failure time (AFT) model. Results show that drivers are mostly risk-averse and quit on-street parking search very soon after potential loses begin to accumulate. The implications of game-based methods for simulation model development and sustainable parking policy are further discussed.

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