This Was (Not) Intended: How Intent Communication and Biometrics Can Enhance Social Interactions With Robots

Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) are robots that are designed to replicate the role of a caregiver, coach, or teacher, providing emotional, cognitive, and social cues to support a specific group. SARs are becoming increasingly prevalent, especially in elderly care. Effective communication, both explicit and implicit, is a critical aspect of human-robot interaction involving SARs. Intent communication is necessary for SARs to engage in effective communication with humans. Biometrics can provide crucial information about a person's identity or emotions. By linking these biometric signals to the communication of intent, SARs can gain a profound understanding of their users and tailor their interactions accordingly. The development of reliable and robust biometric sensing and analysis systems is critical to the success of SARs. In this work, we focus on four different aspects to evaluate the communication of intent involving SARs, existing works, and our outlook on future works and applications.

mmSense: Detecting Concealed Weapons with a Miniature Radar Sensor

For widespread adoption, public security and surveillance systems must be accurate, portable, compact, and real-time, without impeding the privacy of the individuals being observed. Current systems broadly fall into two categories -- image-based which are accurate, but lack privacy, and RF signal-based, which preserve privacy but lack portability, compactness and accuracy. Our paper proposes mmSense, an end-to-end portable miniaturised real-time system that can accurately detect the presence of concealed metallic objects on persons in a discrete, privacy-preserving modality. mmSense features millimeter wave radar technology, provided by Google's Soli sensor for its data acquisition, and TransDope, our real-time neural network, capable of processing a single radar data frame in 19 ms. mmSense achieves high recognition rates on a diverse set of challenging scenes while running on standard laptop hardware, demonstrating a significant advancement towards creating portable, cost-effective real-time radar based surveillance systems.

Exploring Human-robot Interaction by Simulating Robots

As collaborative robots enter industrial shop floors, logistics, and manufacturing, rapid and flexible evaluation of human-machine interaction has become more important. The availability of consumer headsets for virtual and augmented realities has lowered the barrier of entry for virtual environments. In this paper, we explore the different aspects of using such environments for simulating robots in user studies and present the first findings from our own research work. Finally, we recommend directions for applying and using simulation in human-robot interaction.