FW-HTF-P: Mitigating Risks in Future Police Work through Social Telerobotic Communication

在执法中，应急情景的压力可能会阻碍对口头信息的理解和对他人情绪状态的解读。这可能会导致潜在的错误判断，导致生死后果，可能会在整个家庭、社区和社会中产生多年的共鸣。为此，机器人长期以来一直在危险场景中提供更安全的替代方案来直接与人类互动，例如爆炸物处理和监视。然而，这些都是相对特殊的情况：更多的警察工作依赖于人际沟通，而人际沟通需要发展相互关系、同理心和信任。不幸的是，现代远程技术阻碍了这些信任关系的必要发展，降低了对局势的认识，并扰乱了公民和执法部门之间的沟通。为了保护军官和平民在相互接触中的福利，一个跨学科的调查小组正在开发一种远程遥控社交机器人原型，用于涉及公共安全的危险行动。其目的是最大限度地减少危险，同时提高远程人际沟通的质量，通过多模式“在场”和通过社交机器人进行沟通。在这些早期调查期间开展的活动将旨在发展利益攸关方关系，并与当地执法培训网站进行迭代原型和设计研究。调查人员还将讨论研究团队的组成，增加社会、行为、技术、伦理和法律领域的更多专家。这项研究的一个核心原理是，在高风险情况下，使用武力可能是由错误信息、错误沟通、压力和时间压力造成的。预计这项关于高度身临其境、廉价的远程操作社交机器人的初步研究将产生关于人-机器人合作伙伴关系的风险、挑战和要求的知识，并能够促进危险情况下执法人员和公众之间的透明沟通。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

In law enforcement, the stress of emergency-response scenarios can impede understanding of spoken messages and interpretation of other's emotional states. This can lead to potentially incorrect judgments with life or death consequences that can resonate throughout families, communities, and societies for years. To this end, robots have long provided safer alternatives to direct human interaction in hazardous scenarios, such as explosive ordinance disposal and surveillance. However, these are relatively special cases: A much greater share of police work relies on interpersonal communication where the development of mutual relationships, empathy, and trust are required. Unfortunately, modern remote technologies impede the necessary development of these trust relationships, reduce situational awareness, and disrupt communication between citizens and law enforcement. To protect the welfare of both officers and civilians in their mutual encounters, a transdisciplinary team of investigators are developing a prototype teleoperated social robot for use in hazardous operations involving public safety. The aim is to minimize dangers while increasing the quality of remote interpersonal communication, enabled by multimodal "presence" and communication through social robotics.Activities performed during these early investigations will aim at developing stakeholder relations and performing iterative prototyping and design studies with local law enforcement training sites. The investigators will also address the research team composition, adding additional experts in the social, behavioral, technical, ethical, and legal domains. A central rationale of this research is that the use of force can be caused by misinformation, miscommunication, stress and time pressures in high-risk situations. It is expected that this initial research on a highly immersive, inexpensive, teleoperated social robots will generate knowledge on the risks, challenges, and requirements of human-robot partnerships and can facilitate transparent communication between law enforcement officers and the public in hazardous situations.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.