S&AS: INT: Socially-Aware Autonomy for Long-Term Deployment of Always-On Heterogeneous Robot Teams

该项目研究如何最好地使移动机器人团队完全融入人类社区的社会结构。因此，这个项目最重要的影响是核心算法的持续发展和传播，这是第一次使机器人能够在很长一段时间内以一种社会意识的方式完全融入到人类社区中。除了对教育的许多传统影响，包括作为研究生和本科生研究平台的以项目为基础的课程，这项研究还被用作通过示范、营地和短期课程进行广泛公共宣传的基础，特别关注计算机科学与工程专业的女性和西班牙裔学生等代表性不足的群体。这个项目集中于三个主要的技术挑战，这些挑战对于使机器人融入社区的社会结构至关重要。首先，该项目致力于使机器人能够识别动态的社会环境。其次，该项目致力于使机器人在执行特定任务时能够推理出不同的人机能力。第三，该项目致力于在动态环境中实现安全、反思的终身学习。除了产生针对这些特定挑战的集中算法外，该项目的贡献还在能够长期自主的单一、连贯的多机器人系统中实例化。该项目验证计划的一个关键推动者是一个灵活的、可适应的、可重用的软件和硬件基础设施，该基础设施正在德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校的NSF计算研究基础设施项目资助下开发和扩展。该项目的主要实验目标是证明这些机器人不仅可以长时间自主操作，而且可以完全融入并被使用它们所在建筑的社区的人们所接受。

This project studies how best to enable a team of mobile robots to fully integrate into the social fabric of a community of people. As such, the most important impact of this project is the ongoing development and dissemination of core algorithms that, for the first time, enable robots to be fully integrated in a socially-aware way into a community of people over a long period of time. In addition to many traditional impacts on education, including a curriculum for a project-based course, serving as a platform for graduate and undergraduate research, this research is being used as the basis for extensive public outreach via demonstrations, camps, and short courses, with a particular focus on underrepresented groups such as women in Computer Science and Engineering and Hispanic students.This project focusses on three main technical challenges that are crucial to enabling robots to integrate into the social fabric of a community. First, the project is working towards enabling robots to be cognizant about dynamic social environments. Second, the project is working towards enabling robots to reason about heterogeneous human-robot capabilities while carrying out specific tasks. Third, the project is working towards enabling safe, reflective lifelong learning in dynamic environments. In addition to leading to focussed algorithms designed to address these specific challenges, the project contributions are also being instantiated within a single, coherent multi-robot system capable of long-term autonomy. A key facilitator of the project's validation plan is a flexible, adaptable, and reusable software and hardware infrastructure that is being developed and expanded at UT Austin under an NSF Computing Research Infrastructure program grant. The main experimental objective of the project is to demonstrate that these robots can not only operate autonomously for long periods of time, but also be fully integrated into and accepted by the community of people who use the building in which they are situated.