Search results for "Human–robot interaction"

Interaction Capabilities of a Robotic Receptionist

2017

A system aimed at facilitating the interaction between a human user and an humanoid robot is presented. The system is suited to answer questions about laboratories activities, people involved, projects, research themes and collaborations among employees. The task is accomplished by the HermiT reasoner invoked by a speech recognition module. The system is capable of navigating a specific ontology making inference on it. The presented system is part of a broader social robot framework whose goal is to give the user a fulfilling social interaction experience, driven by the perception of the robot internal state and involving intuitive and computational creativity capabilities.

Evaluation of Perception Latencies in a Human-Robot Collaborative Environment

2020

The latency in vision-based sensor systems used in human-robot collaborative environments is an important safety parameter which in most cases has been neglected by researchers. The main reason for this neglect is the lack of an accurate ground-truth sensor system with a minimal delay to benchmark the vision-sensors against. In this paper the latencies of 3D vision-based sensors are experimentally evaluated and analyzed using an accurate laser-tracker system which communicates on a dedicated EtherCAT channel with minimal delay. The experimental results in the paper demonstrate that the latency in the vision-based sensor system is many orders higher than the latency in the control and actuat…

Decoupled nonlinear adaptive control of position and stiffness for pneumatic soft robots

2020

This article addresses the problem of simultaneous and robust closed-loop control of joint stiffness and position, for a class of antagonistically actuated pneumatic soft robots with rigid links and compliant joints. By introducing a first-order dynamic equation for the stiffness variable and using the additional control degree of freedom, embedded in the null space of the pneumatic actuator matrix, an innovative control approach is introduced comprising an adaptive compensator and a dynamic decoupler. The proposed solution builds upon existing adaptive control theory and provides a technique for closing the loop on joint stiffness in pneumatic variable stiffness actuators. Under a very mi…

Smart sensing and adaptive reasoning for enabling industrial robots with interactive human-robot capabilities in dynamic environments — a case study

2019

Traditional industry is seeing an increasing demand for more autonomous and flexible manufacturing in unstructured settings, a shift away from the fixed, isolated workspaces where robots perform predefined actions repetitively. This work presents a case study in which a robotic manipulator, namely a KUKA KR90 R3100, is provided with smart sensing capabilities such as vision and adaptive reasoning for real-time collision avoidance and online path planning in dynamically-changing environments. A machine vision module based on low-cost cameras and color detection in the hue, saturation, value (HSV) space is developed to make the robot aware of its changing environment. Therefore, this vision a…

Lying Cheating Robots : Robots and Infidelity

2018

Love has been described as unpredictable, immeasurable and non-purchasable and as such, poses challenges for anyone in a relationship to both stay in love, and to not fall in love with someone else. Scientists are still discovering whether or not love follows any specific recipe. Outlooks, personality, sense of humor and talent may not perfectly guarantee an individual falls in love with another, and more importantly is able to sustain that relationship. This article portrays a futuristic scenario in which truly intelligent and emotional robots already exist. Here, the bi-directional love discussed in Lovotics is not simulated through engineering, but rather is genuine from the perspectives…

2018

Despite major progress in Robotics and AI, robots are still basically "zombies" repeatedly achieving actions and tasks without understanding what they are doing. Deep-Learning AI programs classify tremendous amounts of data without grasping the meaning of their inputs or outputs. We still lack a genuine theory of the underlying principles and methods that would enable robots to understand their environment, to be cognizant of what they do, to take appropriate and timely initiatives, to learn from their own experience and to show that they know that they have learned and how. The rationale of this paper is that the understanding of its environment by an agent (the agent itself and its effect…

Would a robot trust you? Developmental robotics model of trust and theory of mind

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human - robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estima…

Acceptability Study of A3-K3 Robotic Architecture for a Neurorobotics Painting

2019

In this paper, authors present a novel architecture for controlling an industrial robot via Brain Computer Interface. The robot used is a Series 2000 KR 210-2. The robotic arm was fitted with DI drawing devices that clamp, hold and manipulate various artistic media like brushes, pencils, pens. User selected a high-level task, for instance a shape or movement, using a human machine interface and the translation in robot movement was entirely demanded to the Robot Control Architecture defining a plan to accomplish user's task. The architecture was composed by a Human Machine Interface based on P300 Brain Computer Interface and a robotic architecture composed by a deliberative layer and a reac…

Knowledge acquisition through introspection in Human-Robot Cooperation

2018

Abstract When cooperating with a team including humans, robots have to understand and update semantic information concerning the state of the environment. The run-time evaluation and acquisition of new concepts fall in the critical mass learning. It is a cognitive skill that enables the robot to show environmental awareness to complete its tasks successfully. A kind of self-consciousness emerges: the robot activates the introspective mental processes inferring if it owns a domain concept or not, and correctly blends the conceptual meaning of new entities. Many works attempt to simulate human brain functions leading to neural network implementation of consciousness; regrettably, some of thes…

Modelling and Control of a 2-DOF Robot Arm with Elastic Joints for Safe Human-Robot Interaction

2021

Collaborative robots (or cobots) are robots that can safely work together or interact with humans in a common space. They gradually become noticeable nowadays. Compliant actuators are very relevant for the design of cobots. This type of actuation scheme mitigates the damage caused by unexpected collision. Therefore, elastic joints are considered to outperform rigid joints when operating in a dynamic environment. However, most of the available elastic robots are relatively costly or difficult to construct. To give researchers a solution that is inexpensive, easily customisable, and fast to fabricate, a newly-designed low-cost, and open-source design of an elastic joint is presented in this w…