NRI: Collaborative Research: Co-Exploration using Science Hypothesis Maps

这个项目研究了一种新的勘探方法。在这种方法中，探险者对去向的描述不是由路径规定的，而是由探险者所相信的模型来规定的。在人类科学家和机器人探险家共同工作的背景下，这种方法将合作机器人关系转变为人类和机器人共同努力填补知识空白以进行发现的合作。科学假说地图是人类科学家最初描述他们对世界的信念的结构，其中信念状态随着机器人探索者收集信息而演变。该项目解决了人类/机器人交互的一个紧迫且研究不足的领域：它通过精心制作对环境的表示对人类具有表现力和直觉的环境表示，同时量化信息以实现有意义的机器人决策，直接解决了人类科学家与远程机器人探索者交互的挑战。假设地图的制定是对我们之前专注于人类目标选择和机器人自主的工作的一种新颖和根本的背离。它有可能通过改变人类和机器人之间关系的性质，从监督控制到共享信息发现，从而给探索机器人技术带来革命性的变化。

This project studies a new approach to exploration. In this approach, the explorer's description of where to go is not prescribed by a path, but instead by a model of what the explorer believes. In the context of a human scientist and robotic explorer working together, this approach transforms the co-robotic relationship into a collaboration in which the human and robot work together to fill in gaps in knowledge to make discoveries. The science hypothesis map is the structure in which human scientists initially describe their belief about the world and in which the belief state evolves as the robotic explorer collects information. This project addresses a pressing and understudied area of human/robot interaction: it directly tackles the challenges of human scientist interaction with remote robotic explorer by crafting a representation of the environment that is expressive and intuitive for the human while quantifying information to enable meaningful robotic decisions. The hypothesis map formulation is a novel and radical departure from our prior work which has focused on human goal selection and robotic autonomy. It has the potential to revolutionize exploration robotics by changing the nature of the relationship between human and robot from supervisory control to shared information discovery.