REU Site: Collaborative Human-Robot Interaction

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Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) has the potential to affect several real world domains such as hospitals, homes, schools, offices, or infrastructure sites where robots are uniquely able to assist a human team member to achieve a common goal. However, there are many challenges for effective human-robot collaboration that impinge on this promise, such as communicating with human partners using natural language, providing information to an operator through a visual interface, or quickly providing information so that a person is able to offer assistance. We propose an HRI direction that provides several closely-related projects for undergraduate research experiences. The project team will mentor 10 undergraduates each summer, pursuing research directly impacting assistive robotics, in the following technical areas: development of autonomous robot capabilities targeted for care environments, such as networked robotics devices cooperating with care professionals to perform complex tasks in support of aging in place; human command-and-control infrastructure for operations that utilize robots for technology support; and connectivity and security for a network of robots, computers, and embedded devices collectively used to mission-critical goals while utilizing unused parts of the wireless spectrum. The goal of this Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) site is to develop and evaluate robotic systems whose function is to help bridge the human-robot collaboration gap and achieve the above objectives efficiently and effectively. The summer activities for undergraduates will provide hands-on science and engineering activities related to current research projects, and professional development with training sessions on writing a graduate school application and how to apply for fellowships to support graduate education. The site will develop new autonomous robot capabilities and supporting network and data science technology to address real-world challenges of operating autonomous systems in hospital, clinic, home, and infrastructure environments. This site will develop solutions for semi-autonomous robot behavior with humans in the loop, wireless network connections in rapidly changing frequency domains, and processing high volumes of real-world data. The proposed site presents five projects related to these computing domains: Empirical Study of Socially-Appropriate Interaction; Language-Based Human-Robot Collaboration; Autonomous Robotic Exploration of Underground Mine Environments; Multi-robot Collaboration and Human in-the-loop for Safe, Accurate and Reliable Inspection; and Network Management of Heterogeneous Robotics Devices in a Wireless Environment. This REU site links these projects together through the common objective of developing assistive technology. Students will develop domain knowledge, mathematical skills, and interdisciplinary competency. The possible intellectual properties resulting from this project will include study on long-term human-robot interaction, wireless networking for challenging signal environments, autonomous robot capabilities for human-robot teaming, and data science tools for processing high volumes of data from real-world systems.