RI: Small: To Ask or Not to Ask - A Foundation for the Optimization of Human-Robot Networks

一支无人驾驶汽车团队可以在救灾、应急和国家安全等领域产生巨大影响。人类操作员是这些任务不可或缺的一部分。考虑到任务的复杂性、操作环境的严酷和资源的限制，从根本上理解人类和机器人如何最好地交互是成功操作的关键。这项提议引入了一种新的多学科方法，用于在存在不确定性的情况下高效地进行人-机器人协作，完成需要视觉搜索的任务。所提出的表征人类视觉表现的方法论也有助于人类感知和认知心理学领域。这项提案也有一个重要的教育组成部分，针对加州中部地区和加州大学圣巴巴拉分校代表不足的学生。该提案提出了一种新的方法，用于预测人们是否能够对给定的感官输入做出正确的视觉决定。该方法基于使用亚马逊机械土耳其人的大量输入来训练卷积神经网络。这种对人类视觉性能的基础性理解将对机器人领域决策具有重要意义。考虑到对人类视觉能力的正确理解，将为机器人现场操作开发一套新的数学工具。这使得机器人能够正确地决定何时寻求人类的帮助，何时依靠自己，以及何时感知更多。最后，由于链路质量的空间变化特性，可以显著影响寻求人类帮助，因此描述了通信成本的特征。所提出的理论和设计范例将在机器人试验台上进行验证。

A team of unmanned vehicles can have tremendous impact in areas such as disaster relief, emergency response, and national security. Human operators are an integral part of these missions. Given the complexity of the tasks, harshness of the operation environments, and resource limitations, a fundamental understanding of how humans and robots can best interact is crucial to a successful operation. This proposal introduces a new multidisciplinary approach for efficient human-robot collaboration on tasks that require a visual search in the presence of uncertainty. The proposed methodology for characterizing human visual performance also contributes to the field of human perception and cognitive psychology. This proposal also has a significant educational component targeting under-represented students of the central California area and UC Santa Barbara.A new methodology is proposed for predicting whether people can make a correct visual decision for a given sensory input. The approach is based on training convolutional neural networks using extensive input from Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. This foundational understanding of human visual performance will have significant implication for robotic field decision making. A new set of mathematical tools will be developed for robotic field operation, given a proper understanding of human visual capabilities. This enables a robot to properly decide when to seek human help, when to rely on itself, and when to sense more. Finally, the cost of communication is characterized, due to the space-varying nature of link quality, which can significantly affect seeking human help. The proposed theories and design paradigms will be validated using a robotic testbed.