Human-Robot Interaction in Safety-Critical Applications

这笔资金用于支持与城市搜索和救援等安全关键情况下的人-机器人相互作用(HRI)研究相关的前期工作。希望通过将人机界面和机器人学的研究人员聚集在一起，PI将有可能对HRI进行精心设计和严格的研究，而不是过去所做的任何工作。PI将侧重于使人类操作员了解关于机器人及其环境的相关信息的技术的有效性。通过研究HRI的最佳做法，他们将能够创建更好的界面，提供决策支持，并减少操作员的工作量。PI将通过为安全关键的机器人系统创建新的接口来验证他们的发现。他们还将开发测试和评估人-机器人交互的方法，这将产生更好的衡量标准，并将进一步为安全关键应用中的HRI制定最佳做法和设计指南，并通过测试新的和修订的界面进行验证。重要的是了解如何将传感器数据转换为决策支持信息，以减少操作员的工作量和出错的可能性，即使在机器人与操作员物理上分开的情况下也是如此。更广泛的影响：这项工作的结果将使私人投资机构能够为马萨诸塞大学洛厄尔分校的机器人II(本科生/研究生)和人机交互评估(研究生)课程开发课程模块。这项研究将通过会议和期刊文章传播；收集的数据将提供给感兴趣的研究人员。这项研究的所有参与者都将收到对其系统的评价副本，并将有机会与绩效指标讨论结果；预计这些系统将因这种反馈而得到改进，并将鼓励参与者参加未来的研究阶段，以评估经修订的界面。更广泛地说，改善人与机器人的互动将使整个社会受益；例如，结果将有助于为辅助技术以及搜索和救援创造更好的机器人系统。

This is funding to support preliminary work related to the study of human-robot interaction (HRI) in safety-critical situations, such as urban search and rescue. The hope is that by bringing together researchers in HCI and Robotics, it will be possible for the PIs to perform well-designed and rigorous studies of HRI unlike any work that has been done in the past. The PIs will focus on the effectiveness of techniques for making human operators aware of pertinent information regarding the robot and its environment. By studying the best practices in HRI, they will enable the creation of better interfaces that provide decision support and reduce the workload of the operator. The PIs will validate their findings by creating new interfaces for safety-critical robot systems. They will also develop methods for testing and evaluating human-robot interaction, which will result in better metrics, and will further develop best practices and design guidelines for HRI in safety-critical applications, validated through the testing of new and revised interfaces. It is important to understand how to turn sensor data into information for decision support to reduce the workload of the human operator and the potential for error, even when the robot and its operator are physically separated. Broader Impacts: The results of this work will allow the PIs to develop course modules for the Robotics II (undergraduate/graduate) and Evaluation of Human-Computer Interaction (graduate) courses at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell. The research will be disseminated through conference and journal articles; collected data will be made available to interested researchers. All participants in the study will receive copies of the evaluations of their systems, and will have the opportunity to discuss the results with the PIs; it is expected that these systems will improve due to this feedback, and participants will be encouraged to participate in a future study phase to evaluate the revised interfaces. More generally, improving human-robot interaction will benefit society as a whole; for example, the results will be useful to the creation of better robotic systems for assistive technology and for search and rescue.