Two Faces of Human-Robot Interaction: Field and Service Robots

This chapter reports on recent research and development done at Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), encompassing two different perspectives. On the one hand, we have conducted research on field robots tele-operated by remote human operators, targeting Urban Search And Rescue scenarios. Here, research is focused on the challenge of conveying the operator with an effective situation awareness of the robot surroundings. Situation awareness is here understood as "the perception of the elements in the environment within a volume of time and space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their status in the near future'' (Drury et al. 2003). Our approach is based on decoupling operation of the robot perception from the motion command: an Head-Mounted Display displays in stereo a video stream from the cameras onboard the robot, while the gaze of these cameras is controlled by the operator head, and the robot motion is commanded from a gamepad held by the operator. On the other hand, we have addressed the challenge of service robots designed to perform tasks requested by users. Humans interact with these robots, firstly to request a task, and secondly during task execution. The main research challenge is to have these robots to be aware of their own limitations, and ask humans for help to overcome those limitations. We are currently addressing the challenge of developing robust localization and navigation methods targeting office environments.