Exploring the Effects of Shared Autonomy on Cognitive Load and Trust in Human-Robot Interaction

Teleoperation is increasingly recognized as a viable solution for deploying robots in hazardous environments. Controlling a robot to perform a complex or demanding task may overload operators resulting in poor performance. To design a robot controller to assist the human in executing such challenging tasks, a comprehensive understanding of the interplay between the robot's autonomous behavior and the operator's internal state is essential. In this paper, we investigate the relationships between robot autonomy and both the human user's cognitive load and trust levels, and the potential existence of three-way interactions in the robot-assisted execution of the task. Our user study (N=24) results indicate that while autonomy level influences the teleoperator's perceived cognitive load and trust, there is no clear interaction between these factors. Instead, these elements appear to operate independently, thus highlighting the need to consider both cognitive load and trust as distinct but interrelated factors in varying the robot autonomy level in shared-control settings. This insight is crucial for the development of more effective and adaptable assistive robotic systems.

When To Grow? A Fitting Risk-Aware Policy for Layer Growing in Deep Neural Networks

Neural growth is the process of growing a small neural network to a large network and has been utilized to accelerate the training of deep neural networks. One crucial aspect of neural growth is determining the optimal growth timing. However, few studies investigate this systematically. Our study reveals that neural growth inherently exhibits a regularization effect, whose intensity is influenced by the chosen policy for growth timing. While this regularization effect may mitigate the overfitting risk of the model, it may lead to a notable accuracy drop when the model underfits. Yet, current approaches have not addressed this issue due to their lack of consideration of the regularization effect from neural growth. Motivated by these findings, we propose an under/over fitting risk-aware growth timing policy, which automatically adjusts the growth timing informed by the level of potential under/overfitting risks to address both risks. Comprehensive experiments conducted using CIFAR-10/100 and ImageNet datasets show that the proposed policy achieves accuracy improvements of up to 1.3% in models prone to underfitting while achieving similar accuracies in models suffering from overfitting compared to the existing methods.

Data-Driven Goal Recognition in Transhumeral Prostheses Using Process Mining Techniques

A transhumeral prosthesis restores missing anatomical segments below the shoulder, including the hand. Active prostheses utilize real-valued, continuous sensor data to recognize patient target poses, or goals, and proactively move the artificial limb. Previous studies have examined how well the data collected in stationary poses, without considering the time steps, can help discriminate the goals. In this case study paper, we focus on using time series data from surface electromyography electrodes and kinematic sensors to sequentially recognize patients' goals. Our approach involves transforming the data into discrete events and training an existing process mining-based goal recognition system. Results from data collected in a virtual reality setting with ten subjects demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed goal recognition approach, which achieves significantly better precision and recall than the state-of-the-art machine learning techniques and is less confident when wrong, which is beneficial when approximating smoother movements of prostheses.

A Weak Monotonicity Based Muscle Fatigue Detection Algorithm for a Short-Duration Poor Posture Using sEMG Measurements

Muscle fatigue is usually defined as a decrease in the ability to produce force. The surface electromyography (sEMG) signals have been widely used to provide information about muscle activities including detecting muscle fatigue by various data-driven techniques such as machine learning and statistical approaches. However, it is well-known that sEMG signals are weak signals (low amplitude of the signals) with a low signal-to-noise ratio, data-driven techniques cannot work well when the quality of the data is poor. In particular, the existing methods are unable to detect muscle fatigue coming from static poses. This work exploits the concept of weak monotonicity, which has been observed in the process of fatigue, to robustly detect muscle fatigue in the presence of measurement noises and human variations. Such a population trend methodology has shown its potential in muscle fatigue detection as demonstrated by the experiment of a static pose.

Frequency Superposition -- A Multi-Frequency Stimulation Method in SSVEP-based BCIs

The steady-state visual evoked potential (SSVEP) is one of the most widely used modalities in brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) due to its many advantages. However, the existence of harmonics and the limited range of responsive frequencies in SSVEP make it challenging to further expand the number of targets without sacrificing other aspects of the interface or putting additional constraints on the system. This paper introduces a novel multi-frequency stimulation method for SSVEP and investigates its potential to effectively and efficiently increase the number of targets presented. The proposed stimulation method, obtained by the superposition of the stimulation signals at different frequencies, is size-efficient, allows single-step target identification, puts no strict constraints on the usable frequency range, can be suited to self-paced BCIs, and does not require specific light sources. In addition to the stimulus frequencies and their harmonics, the evoked SSVEP waveforms include frequencies that are integer linear combinations of the stimulus frequencies. Results of decoding SSVEPs collected from nine subjects using canonical correlation analysis (CCA) with only the frequencies and harmonics as reference, also demonstrate the potential of using such a stimulation paradigm in SSVEP-based BCIs.

The Use of Implicit Human Motor Behaviour in the Online Personalisation of Prosthetic Interfaces

In previous work, the authors proposed a data-driven optimisation algorithm for the personalisation of human-prosthetic interfaces, demonstrating the possibility of adapting prosthesis behaviour to its user while the user performs tasks with it. This method requires that the human and the prosthesis personalisation algorithm have same pre-defined objective function. This was previously ensured by providing the human with explicit feedback on what the objective function is. However, constantly displaying this information to the prosthesis user is impractical. Moreover, the method utilised task information in the objective function which may not be available from the wearable sensors typically used in prosthetic applications. In this work, the previous approach is extended to use a prosthesis objective function based on implicit human motor behaviour, which represents able-bodied human motor control and is measureable using wearable sensors. The approach is tested in a hardware implementation of the personalisation algorithm on a prosthetic elbow, where the prosthetic objective function is a function of upper-body compensation, and is measured using wearable IMUs. Experimental results on able-bodied subjects using a supernumerary prosthetic elbow mounted on an elbow orthosis suggest that it is possible to use a prosthesis objective function which is implicit in human behaviour to achieve collaboration without providing explicit feedback to the human, motivating further studies.

Task-space Synergies for Reaching using Upper-limb Prostheses

Synergistic prostheses enable the coordinated movement of the human-prosthetic arm, as required by activities of daily living. This is achieved by coupling the motion of the prosthesis to the human command, such as residual limb movement in motion-based interfaces. Previous studies demonstrated that developing human-prosthetic synergies in joint-space must consider individual motor behaviour and the intended task to be performed, requiring personalisation and task calibration. In this work, an alternative synergy-based strategy, utilising a synergistic relationship expressed in task-space, is proposed. This task-space synergy has the potential to replace the need for personalisation and task calibration with a model-based approach requiring knowledge of the individual user's arm kinematics, the anticipated hand motion during the task and voluntary information from the prosthetic user. The proposed method is compared with surface electromyography-based and joint-space synergy-based prosthetic interfaces in a study of motor behaviour and task performance on able-bodied subjects using a VR-based transhumeral prosthesis. Experimental results showed that for a set of forward reaching tasks the proposed task-space synergy achieves comparable performance to joint-space synergies and superior to conventional surface electromyography. Case study results with an amputee subject motivate the further development of the proposed task-space synergy method.

Control Barrier Functions for Mechanical Systems: Theory and Application to Robotic Grasping

Control barrier functions have been demonstrated to be a useful method of ensuring constraint satisfaction for a wide class of controllers, however existing results are mostly restricted to continuous time systems of relative degree one. Mechanical systems, including robots, are typically second-order systems in which the control occurs at the force/torque level. These systems have velocity and position constraints (i.e. relative degree two) that are vital for safety and/or task execution. Additionally, mechanical systems are typically controlled digitally as sampled-data systems. The contribution of this work is two-fold. First, is the development of novel, robust control barrier functions that ensure constraint satisfaction for relative degree two, sampled-data systems in the presence of model uncertainty. Second, is the application of the proposed method to the challenging problem of robotic grasping in which a robotic hand must ensure an object remains inside the grasp while manipulating it to a desired reference trajectory. A grasp constraint satisfying controller is proposed that can admit existing nominal manipulation controllers from the literature, while simultaneously ensuring no slip, no over-extension (e.g. singular configurations), and no rolling off of the fingertips. Simulation and experimental results validate the proposed control for the robotic hand application.

Personalized On-line Adaptation of Kinematic Synergies for Human-Prosthesis Interfaces

Synergies have been adopted in prosthetic limb applications to reduce complexity of design, but typically involve a single synergy setting for a population and ignore individual preference or adaptation capacity. In this paper, a systematic design of kinematic synergies for human-prosthesis interfaces using on-line measurements from each individual is proposed. The task of reaching using the upper-limb is described by an objective function and the interface is parameterized by a kinematic synergy. Consequently, personalizing the interface for a given individual can be formulated as finding an optimal personalized parameter. A structure to model the observed motor behavior that allows for the personalized traits of motor preference and motor learning is proposed, and subsequently used in an on-line optimization scheme to identify the synergies for an individual. The knowledge of the common features contained in the model enables on-line adaptation of the human-prosthesis interface to happen concurrently to human motor adaptation without the need to re-tune the parameters of the on-line algorithm for each individual. Human-in-the-loop experimental results with able-bodied subjects, performed in a virtual reality environment to emulate amputation and prosthesis use, show that the proposed personalization algorithm was effective in obtaining optimal synergies with a fast uniform convergence speed across a group of individuals.

Robust Object Manipulation for Tactile-based Blind Grasping

Tactile-based blind grasping addresses realistic robotic grasping in which the hand only has access to proprioceptive and tactile sensors. The robotic hand has no prior knowledge of the object/grasp properties, such as object weight, inertia, and shape. There exists no manipulation controller that rigorously guarantees object manipulation in such a setting. Here, a robust control law is proposed for object manipulation in tactile-based blind grasping. The analysis ensures semi-global asymptotic and exponential stability in the presence of model uncertainties and external disturbances that are neglected in related work. Simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.