Leveraging people's everyday skill sets for interaction with robots

随着先进的机器人技术开始进入公众的日常生活，例如作为实用机器人或医疗保健机器人，重要的是要考虑人和机器人如何沟通，以及人们如何发出命令或提取数据。不幸的是，与机器人交互可能非常困难，通常需要培训和专业知识。由于许多机器人用户可能不是机器人专家，因此我相信让与机器人的交互像与其他人的交互一样简单非常重要。 在这项工作中，我们不再以机器人为中心的命令控制台，而是构建了机器人，使人们能够利用现有的日常（非机器人导向）能力和工作实践（例如，教导他人和指导的能力，或与动物合作的技能）来完成复杂的机器人交互任务。我们进一步的目标是更深入地了解机器人可以在其设计中利用哪些现有的社交技能和结构、它们如何影响它们融入的环境以及设计如何影响影响。 作为这项工作的一部分，我们将研究机器人可以协助哪些日常任务，以及机器人可以集成到哪些现有的交互结构中。其次，我们将开发新的机器人实现，作为将现有人类交互技术融入机器人行为和设计的概念验证。最后，我们将把我们的新技术应用到现实环境中，并观察使用它们的人们，以此作为测试我们的设计并进一步为未来的界面提供信息的手段。 由此产生的新的人机界面将成为首批实用的机器人实现之一，旨在自然地融入现有的日常场景和社会结构，并且上下文评估将为人们如何在现实世界中与机器人交互提供新的见解。

As advancing robotic technology begins to enter the everyday world of the general public, for example as utility or health-care robots, it is important to consider how people and robots will communicate, and how people will issue commands or extract data. Unfortunately, interacting with robots can be very difficult and generally requires training and expertise. As many robot users may not be robotics experts, I believe that it will be important to make interacting with robots as easy as interacting with other people. In this work we move away from robot-centric command consoles, and built robots that enable people to accomplish complex robot interaction tasks using their existing everyday (non-robot oriented) abilities and work practices (e.g., ability to teach others and give directions, or skills working with animals). We further aim to develop a stronger understanding of which existing social skills and structures robots can leverage in their designs, how they impact environments they integrate into, and how impact can be influenced by design. As one component of this work we will study which everyday tasks robots could assist with, and which existing interaction structures a robot could integrate into. Second, we will develop new robotic implementations which serve as proofs-of-concepts for incorporating existing human interaction techniques into robotic behaviors and designs. Finally, we will place our new technologies into real-world environments and observe people working with them as a means to test our designs and to further inform future interfaces. The resulting new human-robot interfaces will be among the first practical robot implementations that are designed to integrate naturally into existing everyday scenarios and social structures, and the in-context evaluations will provide new insight into how people interact with robots in real-world settings.