AAAI Fall Symposium: Patrícia Alves-Oliveira on human-robot interaction design

Anton Grabolle / Better Images of AI / Human-AI collaboration / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

The AAAI Fall Symposium Series happened in Arlington, USA, and comprised seven completely different symposia. One in all these, the tenth Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction (AI-HRI) symposium was run as a hybrid in-person/on-line occasion, and we tuned in to the opening keynote, which was given by Patrícia Alves-Oliveira.

As a psychology pupil, Patrícia’s dream was to turn out to be a therapist. Nonetheless, an internship, the place she encountered a robotic for the primary time, impressed her to alter her plans, and he or she determined to enter the sector of human-robot interplay. Following a PhD within the subject, she labored as a postdoc, earlier than heading to trade as a designer within the Amazon Astro robot crew.

Patrícia has labored on a lot of attention-grabbing tasks throughout her time in academia and in trade. Eager about the way to design robots for particular person wants, and maintaining the person on the forefront throughout the design course of, has been core to her work. She started by summarising three very completely different tutorial tasks.

Creativity and robotics

The target of this undertaking was to design, fabricate, and consider robots as creativity-provoking instruments for teenagers. Patrícia created a social robotic named YOLO (or Your Personal Residing Object) that she designed to be child-proof (in different phrases, it may face up to being dropped and knocked over), with the purpose of making an attempt to assist kids discover their creativity throughout play. A machine studying algorithm learns the sample of play that the kid has and adapts the robotic behaviour accordingly. You’ll be able to see the robotic in motion within the demo beneath:

FLEXI robotic

As a postdoc undertaking, Patrícia labored on constructing FLEXI, a social robot embodiment kit. This package consists of a robotic (with a face, and a torso with a display on the entrance), which could be customised, and an open-source end-user programming interface designed to be user-friendly. The customisation ingredient implies that it may be used for a lot of purposes. The crew has deployed FLEXI throughout three utility eventualities: community-support, psychological well being, and training, with the purpose of assessing the flexibleness of the system. You’ll be able to see the robotic in motion, in several eventualities, here.

Social eating

This undertaking centred on a robotic arm for individuals with impaired mobility. Such methods exist already for helping individuals with duties reminiscent of consuming. Nonetheless, in a social context they’ll typically type a barrier between the person and the remainder of the group. The thought behind this undertaking was to contemplate how such a robotic could possibly be tailored to work nicely in a social context, for instance, throughout a meal with household or pals. The crew interviewed individuals with impaired mobility to evaluate their wants, and got here up with a set of design rules for creating robot-assisted feeding methods and an implementation information for future analysis on this space. You’ll be able to learn the analysis paper on this undertaking here.

You’ll find out extra about these three tasks, and the opposite tasks that Patrícia has been concerned in, here.

Astro robotic

Patrícia has lengthy been serious about robots for the true world, and the way this real-world expertise is aligned with the research of robots in academia and trade. She determined to depart academia and be a part of the Astro robotic programme, which she felt was an amazing alternative to work on a large-scale real-world robotic undertaking.

The Astro robotic is a house robotic designed to help with duties reminiscent of monitoring your home, delivering small objects inside the house, recognising your pet, telling a narrative, or enjoying video games.

Patrícia took us by a typical day within the lifetime of a designer the place she all the time has in thoughts the larger image of what the crew is aiming for, in different phrases, what the best robotic, and its interactions with people, would appear to be. Coupled to that, the method is ruled by core design tenets, such because the buyer wants, and non-negotiable core parts that the robotic ought to embody. When contemplating a specific ingredient of the robotic design, for instance, the supply of an merchandise within the robotic tray, Patrícia makes use of storyboards to map out particulars of potential human-robot interactions. An essential side of design issues edge instances, which happen commonly in the true world. Good design will think about potential edge instances and incorporate methods to cope with them.

Patrícia closed by emphasising the significance of teamwork within the design course of, particularly, the necessity for interdisciplinary groups; by contemplating design from many alternative factors of view, the possibility of innovation is larger.

You’ll find out extra in regards to the Synthetic Intelligence for Human-Robotic Interplay (AI-HRI) symposium here.

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