"One Soy Latte for Daniel": Visual and Movement Communication of Intention from a Robot Waiter to a Group of Customers

Service robots are increasingly employed in the hospitality industry for delivering food orders in restaurants. However, in current practice the robot often arrives at a fixed location for each table when delivering orders to different patrons in the same dining group, thus requiring a human staff member or the customers themselves to identify and retrieve each order. This study investigates how to improve the robot's service behaviours to facilitate clear intention communication to a group of users, thus achieving accurate delivery and positive user experiences. Specifically, we conduct user studies (N=30) with a Temi service robot as a representative delivery robot currently adopted in restaurants. We investigated two factors in the robot's intent communication, namely visualisation and movement trajectories, and their influence on the objective and subjective interaction outcomes. A robot personalising its movement trajectory and stopping location in addition to displaying a visualisation of the order yields more accurate intent communication and successful order delivery, as well as more positive user perception towards the robot and its service. Our results also showed that individuals in a group have different interaction experiences.

Robotic Vision for Human-Robot Interaction and Collaboration: A Survey and Systematic Review

Robotic vision for human-robot interaction and collaboration is a critical process for robots to collect and interpret detailed information related to human actions, goals, and preferences, enabling robots to provide more useful services to people. This survey and systematic review presents a comprehensive analysis on robotic vision in human-robot interaction and collaboration over the last 10 years. From a detailed search of 3850 articles, systematic extraction and evaluation was used to identify and explore 310 papers in depth. These papers described robots with some level of autonomy using robotic vision for locomotion, manipulation and/or visual communication to collaborate or interact with people. This paper provides an in-depth analysis of current trends, common domains, methods and procedures, technical processes, data sets and models, experimental testing, sample populations, performance metrics and future challenges. This manuscript found that robotic vision was often used in action and gesture recognition, robot movement in human spaces, object handover and collaborative actions, social communication and learning from demonstration. Few high-impact and novel techniques from the computer vision field had been translated into human-robot interaction and collaboration. Overall, notable advancements have been made on how to develop and deploy robots to assist people.

Learning to Assist and Communicate with Novice Drone Pilots for Expert Level Performance

Multi-task missions for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) involving inspection and landing tasks are challenging for novice pilots due to the difficulties associated with depth perception and the control interface. We propose a shared autonomy system, alongside supplementary information displays, to assist pilots to successfully complete multi-task missions without any pilot training. Our approach comprises of three modules: (1) a perception module that encodes visual information onto a latent representation, (2) a policy module that augments pilot's actions, and (3) an information augmentation module that provides additional information to the pilot. The policy module is trained in simulation with simulated users and transferred to the real world without modification in a user study (n=29), alongside supplementary information schemes including learnt red/green light feedback cues and an augmented reality display. The pilot's intent is unknown to the policy module and is inferred from the pilot's input and UAV's states. The assistant increased task success rate for the landing and inspection tasks from [16.67% & 54.29%] respectively to [95.59% & 96.22%]. With the assistant, inexperienced pilots achieved similar performance to experienced pilots. Red/green light feedback cues reduced the required time by 19.53% and trajectory length by 17.86% for the inspection task, where participants rated it as their preferred condition due to the intuitive interface and providing reassurance. This work demonstrates that simple user models can train shared autonomy systems in simulation, and transfer to physical tasks to estimate user intent and provide effective assistance and information to the pilot.

Towards vision-based dual arm robotic fruit harvesting

Interest in agricultural robotics has increased considerably in recent years due to benefits such as improvement in productivity and labor reduction. However, current problems associated with unstructured environments make the development of robotic harvesters challenging. Most research in agricultural robotics focuses on single arm manipulation. Here, we propose a dual-arm approach. We present a dual-arm fruit harvesting robot equipped with a RGB-D camera, cutting and collecting tools. We exploit the cooperative task description to maximize the capabilities of the dual-arm robot. We designed a Hierarchical Quadratic Programming based control strategy to fulfill the set of hard constrains related to the robot and environment: robot joint limits, robot self-collisions, robot-fruit and robot-tree collisions. We combine deep learning and standard image processing algorithms to detect and track fruits as well as the tree trunk in the scene. We validate our perception methods on real-world RGB-D images and our control method on simulated experiments.

A Benchmark for Cycling Close Pass Near Miss Event Detection from Video Streams

Cycling is a healthy and sustainable mode of transport. However, interactions with motor vehicles remain a key barrier to increased cycling participation. The ability to detect potentially dangerous interactions from on-bike sensing could provide important information to riders and policy makers. Thus, automated detection of conflict between cyclists and drivers has attracted researchers from both computer vision and road safety communities. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, called Cyc-CP, towards cycling close pass near miss event detection from video streams. We first divide this task into scene-level and instance-level problems. Scene-level detection asks an algorithm to predict whether there is a close pass near miss event in the input video clip. Instance-level detection aims to detect which vehicle in the scene gives rise to a close pass near miss. We propose two benchmark models based on deep learning techniques for these two problems. For training and testing those models, we construct a synthetic dataset and also collect a real-world dataset. Our models can achieve 88.13% and 84.60% accuracy on the real-world dataset, respectively. We envision this benchmark as a test-bed to accelerate cycling close pass near miss detection and facilitate interaction between the fields of road safety, intelligent transportation systems and artificial intelligence. Both the benchmark datasets and detection models will be available at https://github.com/SustainableMobility/cyc-cp to facilitate experimental reproducibility and encourage more in-depth research in the field.

Rotating Objects via In-Hand Pivoting using Vision, Force and Touch

We propose a robotic manipulation system that can pivot objects on a surface using vision, wrist force and tactile sensing. We aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper by allowing rotational slip, while maintaining a desired wrist force profile. Our approach runs an end-effector position controller and a gripper width controller concurrently in a closed loop. The position controller maintains a desired force using vision and wrist force. The gripper controller uses tactile sensing to keep the grip firm enough to prevent translational slip, but loose enough to induce rotational slip. Our sensor-based control approach relies on matching a desired force profile derived from object dimensions and weight and vision-based monitoring of the object pose. The gripper controller uses tactile sensors to detect and prevent translational slip by tightening the grip when needed. Experimental results where the robot was tasked with rotating cuboid objects 90 degrees show that the multi-modal pivoting approach was able to rotate the objects without causing lift or slip, and was more energy-efficient compared to using a single sensor modality and to pick-and-place. While our work demonstrated the benefit of multi-modal sensing for the pivoting task, further work is needed to generalize our approach to any given object.

Crafting with a Robot Assistant: Use Social Cues to Inform Adaptive Handovers in Human-Robot Collaboration

We study human-robot handovers in a naturalistic collaboration scenario, where a mobile manipulator robot assists a person during a crafting session by providing and retrieving objects used for wooden piece assembly (functional activities) and painting (creative activities). We collect quantitative and qualitative data from 20 participants in a Wizard-of-Oz study, generating the Functional And Creative Tasks Human-Robot Collaboration dataset (the FACT HRC dataset), available to the research community. This work illustrates how social cues and task context inform the temporal-spatial coordination in human-robot handovers, and how human-robot collaboration is shaped by and in turn influences people's functional and creative activities.

Human-Robot Team Performance Compared to Full Robot Autonomy in 16 Real-World Search and Rescue Missions: Adaptation of the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Human operators in human-robot teams are commonly perceived to be critical for mission success. To explore the direct and perceived impact of operator input on task success and team performance, 16 real-world missions (10 hrs) were conducted based on the DARPA Subterranean Challenge. These missions were to deploy a heterogeneous team of robots for a search task to locate and identify artifacts such as climbing rope, drills and mannequins representing human survivors. Two conditions were evaluated: human operators that could control the robot team with state-of-the-art autonomy (Human-Robot Team) compared to autonomous missions without human operator input (Robot-Autonomy). Human-Robot Teams were often in directed autonomy mode (70% of mission time), found more items, traversed more distance, covered more unique ground, and had a higher time between safety-related events. Human-Robot Teams were faster at finding the first artifact, but slower to respond to information from the robot team. In routine conditions, scores were comparable for artifacts, distance, and coverage. Reasons for intervention included creating waypoints to prioritise high-yield areas, and to navigate through error-prone spaces. After observing robot autonomy, operators reported increases in robot competency and trust, but that robot behaviour was not always transparent and understandable, even after high mission performance.

Adapting Neural Models with Sequential Monte Carlo Dropout

The ability to adapt to changing environments and settings is essential for robots acting in dynamic and unstructured environments or working alongside humans with varied abilities or preferences. This work introduces an extremely simple and effective approach to adapting neural models in response to changing settings. We first train a standard network using dropout, which is analogous to learning an ensemble of predictive models or distribution over predictions. At run-time, we use a particle filter to maintain a distribution over dropout masks to adapt the neural model to changing settings in an online manner. Experimental results show improved performance in control problems requiring both online and look-ahead prediction, and showcase the interpretability of the inferred masks in a human behaviour modelling task for drone teleoperation.

In-Hand Gravitational Pivoting Using Tactile Sensing

We study gravitational pivoting, a constrained version of in-hand manipulation, where we aim to control the rotation of an object around the grip point of a parallel gripper. To achieve this, instead of controlling the gripper to avoid slip, we embrace slip to allow the object to rotate in-hand. We collect two real-world datasets, a static tracking dataset and a controller-in-the loop dataset, both annotated with object angle and angular velocity labels. Both datasets contain force-based tactile information on ten different household objects. We train an LSTM model to predict the angular position and velocity of the held object from purely tactile data. We integrate this model with a controller that opens and closes the gripper allowing the object to rotate to desired relative angles. We conduct real-world experiments where the robot is tasked to achieve a relative target angle. We show that our approach outperforms a sliding-window based MLP in a zero-shot generalization setting with unseen objects. Furthermore, we show a 16.6% improvement in performance when the LSTM model is fine-tuned on a small set of data collected with both the LSTM model and the controller in-the-loop. Code and videos are available at https://rhys-newbury.github.io/projects/pivoting/