Alberto Finzi

Jonathan Cacace, Alberto Finzi, Vincenzo Lippiello

We present a multimodal interaction framework suitable for a human rescuer that operates in proximity with a set of co-located drones during search missions. This work is framed in the context of the SHERPA project whose goal is to develop a mixed ground and aerial robotic platform to support search and rescue activities in a real-world alpine scenario. Differently from typical human-drone interaction settings, here the operator is not fully dedicated to the drones, but involved in search and rescue tasks, hence only able to provide sparse, incomplete, although high-value, instructions to the robots. This operative scenario requires a human-interaction framework that supports multimodal communication along with an effective and natural mixed-initiative interaction between the human and the robots. In this work, we illustrate the domain and the proposed multimodal interaction framework discussing the system at work in a simulated case study.

Alberto Finzi, Thomas Lukasiewicz

This paper is directed towards combining Pearl's structural-model approach to causal reasoning with high-level formalisms for reasoning about actions. More precisely, we present a combination of Pearl's structural-model approach with Poole's independent choice logic. We show how probabilistic theories in the independent choice logic can be mapped to probabilistic causal models. This mapping provides the independent choice logic with appealing concepts of causality and explanation from the structural-model approach. We illustrate this along Halpern and Pearl's sophisticated notions of actual cause, explanation, and partial explanation. This mapping also adds first-order modeling capabilities and explicit actions to the structural-model approach.