CAREER: Drones in Public: Foundational Interaction Research

小型无人机（sUAV）或无人机是最常用的机器人类型之一，在农业和公共安全领域的户外公共空间中无处不在。 但设计上的限制和缺乏互动原则限制了它们在室内的应用。 这项研究的目标是发现在各种空间和不同用户的通信sUAV飞行路径的广泛交互原则，以便当室内导航和电池寿命等设计限制得到解决时，无人机将能够与人进行安全，高效和信息交互。 为此，第一个挑战将是识别关键的通信故障，或人类和机器人之间的障碍，这些障碍可能会造成不安全和低效的交互，并定义避免这些问题的策略。 将为车辆与用户之间的手势通信制定准则，以产生更安全和更自然的互动，同时尊重个人空间要求。 这项研究的两个核心假设是，手势通信将允许更好地了解机器人的状态或知识，同时适用于现有的平台，无需修改，交互距离将需要适应车辆的设计，用户和环境，以保持舒适性和效率的互动。 这项工作将对教育和社会产生广泛的影响，通过有针对性的活动，以提高对人机交互的理解。 教育将通过活动支持，如K-12学生的课程计划，将研究整合到本科人机交互课程中，并为本科生和研究生提供为期一个学期的人机交互课程（HRI）。 额外的推广工作将包括与当地1级学校的6 - 8年级学生进行为期一个月的互动，向K-5学生传授科学方法，以及为成年人开设夜校，向他们介绍当前的机器人技术和HRI研究。 PI将继续努力扩大计算机科学研究的参与。 这项研究将包括三个平行的目标有关的姿态通信的sUAV和舒适的距离。 目标1将侧重于交通工具状态信息的交流运动;手势将通过参与式设计生成，并使用社会科学方法进行测试。 目标2也将采用社会科学的方法，但将侧重于与sUAV保持距离，并将利用PI实验室中现有的一个带有可移动墙壁、摄像机和动作捕捉系统的房间。 这两个研究目标中的每一个都可以在另一个没有进展的情况下进行;然而，它们一起探索是自然的，因为手势是由不同的车辆传达的，缩放到空间，机器人执行可能需要人类参与的任务。 这一综合调查将包括目标3，重点是有效的信号发送，将测距工作纳入飞行路径，并与执行各种任务的用户进行接收。 项目成果将通过使sUAV生成通信飞行路径来改变近距离HRI，该通信飞行路径基于高度独立的人机团队的接收和舒适度的可能性进行优化。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (sUAVs), or drones, are one of the most adopted types of robot and have become ubiquitous in outdoor public spaces for applications in agriculture and public safety. But design limitations and lack of interaction principles have limited their adoption for indoor uses. The goal of this research is to discover broad interaction principles for communicative sUAV flight paths in various spaces and with diverse users, so that when design limitations such as indoor navigation and battery life are solved the drones will be capable of safe, efficient, and informative interactions with people. To this end, the first challenge will be to identify key communication failures, or barriers between humans and robots, which can create unsafe and inefficient interactions, and to define strategies for avoiding these problems. Guidelines will be developed for gestural communication from a vehicle to a user in order to generate safer and more natural interactions, while respecting personal space requirements. The two central hypotheses underlying this research are that gestural communication will allow better visibility of robot state or knowledge to bystanders while being applicable to existing platforms without modifications, and that interaction distances will need to adapt to the design of the vehicle, the user, and the environment to maintain comfort and efficiency in interactions. This work will have broad impacts both on education and on society through directed activities to improve understanding of human-robot interaction. Education will be supported through activities such as lesson plans for K-12 students, integration of the research into an undergraduate human-computer interaction class, and informing a semester-long course for both undergraduate and graduate students on human-robot interaction (HRI). Additional outreach efforts will include a month-long interaction with 6-8th grade students from local Title 1 schools teaching K-5 students about the scientific method, and an evening class for adults to inform them about current robotics and HRI research. The PI will continue her ongoing efforts to broaden participation in computer science research. This research will encompass three parallel objectives related to gestural communications by sUAVs and comfortable distancing. Objective 1 will focus on communicative motions of state information from the vehicle; gestures will be generated through participatory design and tested using methods from the social sciences. Objective 2 will also be informed by methods from the social sciences, but will focus on distancing with sUAVs and will take advantage of an existing room in the PI's lab with movable walls, video cameras, and a motion capture system. Each of these two research objectives could be carried out in the absence of progress from the other; however, their exploration together is natural since the gestures are conveyed by different vehicles, scaled to spaces, and the robots perform tasks which may require human involvement. This combined investigation will comprise Objective 3, which will focus on efficient signaling, incorporating the distancing work into the flight paths, and reception with users performing a variety of tasks. Project outcomes will transform close-proximity HRI by enabling sUAVs to generate communicative flight paths that are optimized based on likelihood of receipt and comfort in highly independent human-robot teams.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.