Augmented Reality Interfaces in Robotic Manipulation: Assessing the effects of autonomy levels and environmental complexity

This study investigated the human-robot interaction of three different augmented reality interfaces that enabled an operator to control a robot arm. The first control methods gives the operator complete manual control by moving a holographic object which the robot arm copies (Direct control). The second control method allows the operator to...

A Cleaner Public Space Through Robots: An exploratory research into the introduction of a cleaning robot in the Amsterdam Schoon department

The Dutch metropolis of Amsterdam deals with a waste problem. Both the inhabitants and tourists in Amsterdam experience nuisance from litter. The future growth of Amsterdam will only amplify this problem. To address this, the municipality needs to increase the productivity of the Schoon department, the department tasked with keeping the public...

Combining Manipulability and Fatigue for Multi-Metric Authority Arbitration of Physical Human-Robot Collaboration: A Proof of Concept

Human-robot interaction is a growing field that aims to research and develop communication channels between humans and robots to enhance comfort, safety, and productivity in healthcare, the household, and the industry. Researchers have considered ergonomy-related metrics to compose these channels for physical human-robot collaborative scenarios....

Towards an active predictive relation by reconceptualizing a vacuum robot: A study on the transparency and acceptance of the predictive behaviors of vacuum robot

With the development of Artificial intelligence and Machine learning capabilities, the connected objects are extended with predictive capabilities, and the character of things is changed to “things that predict” (Smit, 2021). If a connected device is able to embrace a predictive system that not only profiles for scripted behavior but could also...

Experience Sharing Conversational Agent for Type II Diabetes

In this work, a conversational interaction was designed and implemented to test the effect of references to past events or shared experiences rephrased into motivational phrases within the context of working towards a diet related goal that can assist with type II diabetes over multiple sessions.<br/>Prior works that utilized a memory typically...

Interaction Design Patterns for Social Robot Assistance of Moral Decisions in Healthcare: Confrontation with Resuscitation Dilemmas

The implementation of social robots in the healthcare industry is becoming substantial as a consequence of the scarcity of healthcare professionals, rising costs of healthcare and an increase in the number of vulnerable populations. Social robots will be deployed, in increasing numbers, in assisting health care professionals during the provision...

Scene Classification for a Mobile Interactive Robot

The use of social robots increased in the past few years. Current technology, however, lacks in deploying a single robot for different applications without the help of a human being. Current solutions are time-consuming, labour intensive and hard to generalize. Being aware of its surroundings, in terms of environment and context, the robot can...

Exploring trade-offs in on-board versus cloud-based social robots

Social Robotics is an emerging field in Computer Science. Most social robots currently commercially available to buy do not have fast hardware components. As a result, the built-in software has low accuracy and performance with (amongst others) speech and facial recognition and dialogs during social interaction with users. Cloud computation...

Evaluating trading and sharing control for constraint motion tasks in a domestic environment using a remote controlled semi-autonomous robot

Automation in a domestic environment is not flawless and human interference will be necessary, for implementing robots in this environment. <br/>When remotely controlling semi-autonomous robots, proposed concepts can be divided into two main concepts: To trade control back and forth between the human and the operator and to share control...

Eliciting user engagement with a social robot: Drawing attention techniques for Pepper

The elicitation of user engagement is one of the current challenges of human-robot interaction, alongside with the identification of appropriate metrics to evaluate users' experience. Several studies focused on strategies aimed at maintaining engagement throughout an interaction, but limited research has been done on how to initiate it by...

User Perceptions of a Humanoid Robot's Developing Behavior

An important challenge in developing a social robot is making the interaction between human and robot to be more pleasant and convenient. It could be obtained by making the robot to develop, i.e. change its behavior over the course of time. Here we study two aspects of development: behavioral adaptation and behavioral complexity to which we...

Socially-Aware Navigation: Guiding Behavior with Pepper

Socially-aware robot navigation strives to find efficient methods to autonomously navigate known environments while incorporating social metrics derived from human behavior. Several methods built for navigation on dynamic and uncertain environments have been adapted to resemble human navigation, but fail to appropriately reflect the social...