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

一队无人驾驶车辆可以在救灾、应急响应和国家安全等领域产生巨大影响。 人类操作员是这些任务的组成部分。考虑到任务的复杂性、操作环境的恶劣性和资源的限制，对人类和机器人如何最好地交互的基本理解对于成功的操作至关重要。该建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进行视觉搜索的任务上进行高效的人机协作。 所提出的表征人类视觉性能的方法也有助于人类感知和认知心理学领域。该建议也有一个重要的教育组件，针对代表性不足的学生的中央加州地区和加州大学圣巴巴拉分校。一个新的方法来预测人们是否可以作出正确的视觉决定，为给定的感官输入。 该方法基于使用Amazon Mechanical Turk工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本理解将对机器人领域决策具有重要意义。一套新的数学工具将开发机器人现场操作，给予人类视觉能力的适当理解。这使机器人能够正确地决定何时寻求人类帮助，何时依靠自己，何时感知更多。最后，通信成本的特点，由于空间变化的性质，链路质量，这可能会显着影响寻求人类的帮助。所提出的理论和设计范例将使用机器人试验台进行验证。

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.