Human Robot Interaction

This week we will explore the field of Human Robot Interaction (also known as HRI). Learn about Uncanny Valley, designing robot heads, and using LSTM RNNs to help a robot with walking trajectories. While exploring this field, we will also discuss some of the ethical questions that arise when robots start to co-exist with humans.

The Uncanny Valley

Original Essay by Masahiro Mori

Abstract - More than 40 years ago, Masahiro Mori, a robotics professor at the Tokyo Institute of Technology, wrote an essay [1] on how he envisioned people’s reactions to robots that looked and acted almost like a human. In particular, he hypothesized that a person’s response to a humanlike robot would abruptly shift from empathy to revulsion as it approached, but failed to attain, a lifelike appearance. This descent into eeriness is known as the uncanny valley. The essay appeared in an obscure Japanese journal called Energy in 1970, and in subsequent years, it received almost no attention. However, more recently, the concept of the uncanny valley has rapidly attracted interest in robotics and other scientific circles as well as in popular culture. Some researchers have explored its implications for human–robot interaction and computer-graphics animation, whereas others have investigated its biological and social roots. Now interest in the uncanny valley should only intensify, as technology evolves and researchers build robots that look human. Although copies of Mori’s essay have circulated among researchers, a complete version hasn’t been widely available. The following is the first publication of an English translation that has been authorized and reviewed by Mori. (See “Turning Point” in this issue for an interview with Mori.)

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All robots are not created equal: The design and perception of humanoid robot heads

By Carl F. Disalvo et. al

Abstract - This paper presents design research conducted as part of a larger project on human-robot interaction. The primary goal of this study was to come to an initial understanding of what features and dimensions of a humanoid robot’s face most dramatically contribute to people’s perception of its humanness. To answer this question we analyzed 48 robots and conducted surveys to measure people’s perception of its humanness. Through our research we found that the presence of certain features, the dimensions of the head, and the total number of facial features heavily influence the perception of humanness in robot heads. This paper presents our findings and initial guidelines for the design of humanoid robot heads.

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Social LSTM: Human Trajectory Prediction in Crowded Spaces

By Alexandre Alahi et. al

Abstract - Pedestrians follow different trajectories to avoid obstacles and accommodate fellow pedestrians. Any autonomous vehicle navigating such a scene should be able to anticipate the future positions of pedestrians and accordingly adjust its path to avoid collisions. This problem of trajectory prediction can be viewed as a sequence generation task, where we are interested in predicting the future trajectory of people based on their past positions. Following the recent success of Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) models for sequence prediction tasks, we propose an LSTM model which can learn general human movement and predict their future trajectories. This is in contrast to traditional approaches which use hand-crafted functions such as Social forces. We demonstrate the performance of our method on several public datasets. Our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on some of these datasets . We also analyze the trajectories predicted by our model to demonstrate the motion behaviour learned by our model.

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What Should We Want From a Robot Ethic?

By Peter M. Asaro

Abstract - There are at least three things we might mean by “ethics in robotics”: the ethical systems built into robots,the ethics of people who design and use robots, and the ethics of how people treat robots. This paper argues that the best approach to robot ethics is one which addresses all three of these, and to do this it ought to consider robots as socio-technical systems. By so doing, it is possible to think of a continuum of agency that lies between amoral and fully autonomous moral agents. Thus, robots might move gradually along this continuum as they acquire greater capabilities and ethical sophistication. It also argues that many of the issues regarding the distribution of responsibility in complex socio-technical systems might best be addressed by looking to legal theory, rather than moral theory. This is because our overarching interest in robot ethics ought to be the practical one of preventing robots from doing harm, as well as preventing humans from unjustly avoiding responsibility for their actions.

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Robot ethics: a view from the philosophy of science

By Guglielmo Tamburrini

Abstract - Robot ethics is a branch of applied ethics which endeavours to isolate and analyse ethical issues arising in connection with present and prospective uses of robots. These issues span human autonomy protection and promotion, moral responsibility and liability, privacy, fair access to technological resources, social and cultural discrimination, in addition to the ethical dimensions of personhood and agentivity. This chapter examines distinctive roles that epistemological and methodological reflections on robotics play in ethical inquiries on robotics. In particular, reflections of this sort on models of robot-environment interactions and on models of learning robotic systems are brought to bear on the analysis of autonomy and responsibility issues in robot ethics.

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Videos to Watch

Projects to Work on

Introduction:

You have just read and seen robots that work in the proximity to humans. Now that you have some background, it’s time to build your own! For this week’s lab, you are going to design a physical prototype of a robot that interfaces with humans. The prototype you will build should be just that, a prototype. Your prototype does not need to work, nor should it be expensive (you are limited to $25 total). The goal of this assignment is two fold:

• You will be building something tangible. This is the first step to designing an active robot.
• As Cory mentioned during his talk, his first prototype was a blue trashcan with eyes! Due to the small budget, this will force you to look for other materials to construct your robot (Cardboard, sticks, old cans, etc.).

What to Build:

Think about the type of robot you want to make; is it a mobile robot like Kuri? Is it an industrial robot like Baxter? What is the purpose of your robot? Does it need to talk to humans or just work with them? What type of functionality does your robot need? What social responsibilities / ethics does your robot need to follow? If you need some help getting started, think about the following sectors: entertainment/gaming, healthcare, food, retail.

Time to Build:

Once you have built your prototype, you would probably want to get funding for it. How would you get funding? One of the most common ways is talking to investors. You may not have access to any real investors, but our Slack community can work as a group of people who could be potential investors! Come up with a quick elevator pitch (about 5 – 10 sentences) to pitch your idea to a group of investors. Post a picture of your prototype along with your elevator pitch in our Slack community under the channel #hri.

Secure Funding:

Now that you have pitched your idea, here comes the hard part- getting funding. We do not have any real funding, but we can do some fun virtual funding. To fund a project, add a money emoji reaction to the project indicating if you were an investor, you would fund this project. The more money emojis, the more funding!

Press Release:

Now that the “investors” have voted which project to fund, the person/team with the highest amount of emoji’s will have a write-up posted in our slack community (in #announcements) along with a quick bio of their team and project. Work hard, but most of all, have fun!