Benjamin Johnston

h-index18
2papers
791citations

2 Papers

4.2RONov 14, 2018
Fog Robotics for Efficient, Fluent and Robust Human-Robot Interaction

Siva Leela Krishna Chand Gudi, Suman Ojha, Benjamin Johnston et al.

Active communication between robots and humans is essential for effective human-robot interaction. To accomplish this objective, Cloud Robotics (CR) was introduced to make robots enhance their capabilities. It enables robots to perform extensive computations in the cloud by sharing their outcomes. Outcomes include maps, images, processing power, data, activities, and other robot resources. But due to the colossal growth of data and traffic, CR suffers from serious latency issues. Therefore, it is unlikely to scale a large number of robots particularly in human-robot interaction scenarios, where responsiveness is paramount. Furthermore, other issues related to security such as privacy breaches and ransomware attacks can increase. To address these problems, in this paper, we have envisioned the next generation of social robotic architectures based on Fog Robotics (FR) that inherits the strengths of Fog Computing to augment the future social robotic systems. These new architectures can escalate the dexterity of robots by shoving the data closer to the robot. Additionally, they can ensure that human-robot interaction is more responsive by resolving the problems of CR. Moreover, experimental results are further discussed by considering a scenario of FR and latency as a primary factor comparing to CR models.

3.9ROFeb 15, 2016
Socially Impaired Robots: Human Social Disorders and Robots' Socio-Emotional Intelligence

Jonathan Vitale, Mary-Anne Williams, Benjamin Johnston

Social robots need intelligence in order to safely coexist and interact with humans. Robots without functional abilities in understanding others and unable to empathise might be a societal risk and they may lead to a society of socially impaired robots. In this work we provide a survey of three relevant human social disorders, namely autism, psychopathy and schizophrenia, as a means to gain a better understanding of social robots' future capability requirements. We provide evidence supporting the idea that social robots will require a combination of emotional intelligence and social intelligence, namely socio-emotional intelligence. We argue that a robot with a simple socio-emotional process requires a simulation-driven model of intelligence. Finally, we provide some critical guidelines for designing future socio-emotional robots.