Laurel D. Riek

Aamodh Suresh, Angelique Taylor, Laurel D. Riek et al.

Risky and crowded environments (RCE) contain abstract sources of risk and uncertainty, which are perceived differently by humans, leading to a variety of behaviors. Thus, robots deployed in RCEs, need to exhibit diverse perception and planning capabilities in order to interpret other human agents' behavior and act accordingly in such environments. To understand this problem domain, we conducted a study to explore human path choices in RCEs, enabling better robotic navigational explainable AI (XAI) designs. We created a novel COVID-19 pandemic grocery shopping scenario which had time-risk tradeoffs, and acquired users' path preferences. We found that participants showcase a variety of path preferences: from risky and urgent to safe and relaxed. To model users' decision making, we evaluated three popular risk models (Cumulative Prospect Theory (CPT), Conditional Value at Risk (CVAR), and Expected Risk (ER). We found that CPT captured people's decision making more accurately than CVaR and ER, corroborating theoretical results that CPT is more expressive and inclusive than CVaR and ER. We also found that people's self assessments of risk and time-urgency do not correlate with their path preferences in RCEs. Finally, we conducted thematic analysis of open-ended questions, providing crucial design insights for robots is RCE. Thus, through this study, we provide novel and critical insights about human behavior and perception to help design better navigational explainable AI (XAI) in RCEs.

Zhi Wang, Chicheng Zhang, Manish Kumar Singh et al.

In many real-world applications, multiple agents seek to learn how to perform highly related yet slightly different tasks in an online bandit learning protocol. We formulate this problem as the $ε$-multi-player multi-armed bandit problem, in which a set of players concurrently interact with a set of arms, and for each arm, the reward distributions for all players are similar but not necessarily identical. We develop an upper confidence bound-based algorithm, RobustAgg$(ε)$, that adaptively aggregates rewards collected by different players. In the setting where an upper bound on the pairwise similarities of reward distributions between players is known, we achieve instance-dependent regret guarantees that depend on the amenability of information sharing across players. We complement these upper bounds with nearly matching lower bounds. In the setting where pairwise similarities are unknown, we provide a lower bound, as well as an algorithm that trades off minimax regret guarantees for adaptivity to unknown similarity structure.

Hadas Kress-Gazit, Kerstin Eder, Guy Hoffman et al.

Robot capabilities are maturing across domains, from self-driving cars, to bipeds and drones. As a result, robots will soon no longer be confined to safety-controlled industrial settings; instead, they will directly interact with the general public. The growing field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) studies various aspects of this scenario - from social norms to joint action to human-robot teams and more. Researchers in HRI have made great strides in developing models, methods, and algorithms for robots acting with and around humans, but these "computational HRI" models and algorithms generally do not come with formal guarantees and constraints on their operation. To enable human-interactive robots to move from the lab to real-world deployments, we must address this gap. This article provides an overview of verification, validation and synthesis techniques used to create demonstrably trustworthy systems, describes several HRI domains that could benefit from such techniques, and provides a roadmap for the challenges and the research needed to create formalized and guaranteed human-robot interaction.

Andrea Frank, Laurel Riek

As social beings, much human behavior is predicated on social context - the ambient social state that includes cultural norms, social signals, individual preferences, etc. In this paper, we propose a socially-aware task and motion planning algorithm that considers social context to generate appropriate and effective plans in human social environments (HSEs). The key strength of our proposed approach is that it explicitly models how potential actions not only affect objective cost, but also transform the social context in which it plans and acts. We investigate strategies to limit the complexity of our algorithm, so that our planner will remain tractable for mobile platforms in complex HSEs like hospitals and factories. The planner will also consider the relative importance and urgency of its tasks, which it uses to determine when it is and is not appropriate to violate social expectations to achieve its objective. This social awareness will allow robots to understand a fundamental rule of society: just because something makes your job easier, does not make it the right thing to do! To our knowledge, the proposed work is the first task and motion planning approach that supports socially intelligent robot policy for HSEs. Through this ongoing work, robots will be able to understand, respect, and leverage social context accomplish tasks both acceptably and effectively in HSEs.

Cory J. Hayes, Maryam Moosaei, Laurel D. Riek

As robots enter human environments, they will be expected to accomplish a tremendous range of tasks. It is not feasible for robot designers to pre-program these behaviors or know them in advance, so one way to address this is through end-user programming, such as via learning from demonstration (LfD). While significant work has been done on the mechanics of enabling robot learning from human teachers, one unexplored aspect is enabling mutual feedback between both the human teacher and robot during the learning process, i.e., implicit learning. In this paper, we explore one aspect of this mutual understanding, grounding sequences, where both a human and robot provide non-verbal feedback to signify their mutual understanding during interaction. We conducted a study where people taught an autonomous humanoid robot a dance, and performed gesture analysis to measure people's responses to the robot during correct and incorrect demonstrations.

Michael J. Gonzales, Joshua M. Henry, Aaron W. Calhoun et al.

Preventable medical errors are a severe problem in healthcare, causing over 400,000 deaths per year in the US in hospitals alone. In acute care, the branch of medicine encompassing the emergency department (ED) and intensive care units (ICU), error rates may be higher to due low situational awareness among clinicians performing resuscitation on patients. To support cognition, novice team leaders may rely on reference guides to direct and anticipate future steps. However, guides often act as a fixation point, diverting the leader's attention away from the team. To address this issue, we conducted a qualitative study that evaluates a collaborative cognitive aid co-designed with clinicians called Visual TASK. Our study explored the use of Visual TASK in three simulations employing a projected shared display with two different interaction modalities: the Microsoft Kinect and a touchscreen. Our results suggest that tools like the Kinect, while useful in other areas of acute care like the OR, are unsuitable for use in high-stress situations like resuscitation. We also observed that fixation may not be constrained to reference guides alone, and may extend to other objects in the room. We present our findings, and a discussion regarding future avenues in which collaborative cognitive aids may help in improving situational awareness in resuscitation.

Laurel D. Riek

This chapter discusses the existing and future use of robotics and intelligent sensing technology in mental health care. While the use of this technology is nascent in mental health care, it represents a potentially useful tool in the practitioner's toolbox. The goal of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of the field, discuss the recent use of robotics technology in mental health care practice, explore some of the design issues and ethical issues of using robots in this space, and finally to explore the potential of emerging technology.

Aitor Aladren, Sasa Bodiroza, Hamidreza Chitsaz et al.

Proceedings of the 1st Workshop on Robotics Challenges and Vision (RCV2013)