Artificial Intelligence for Human-Robot Interaction

欧洲和日本都面临着人口萎缩和老龄化的问题。这引发了一系列问题，如劳动力流失，而机器人通常被视为缓解这些问题的一种可能方式。然而，这将要求机器人被引入人类社会，并与人直接接触。人-机器人交互(Human-Robot Interaction，HRI)领域关注的是机器人在社会世界中与人交互的方式。但与人类打交道是出了名的困难，是一个巨大的挑战。与此同时，人工智能技术在日益复杂的任务中也有许多成功的应用。尽管如此，HRI领域在很大程度上还没有从先进的人工智能技术中受益。相反，HRI可以被认为是人工智能的一个非常有动力的挑战，人类在身体和精神上都处于循环中。AI4HRI项目的目标将是开发并紧密集成几项关键的人工智能技术，使社交机器人能够适当和熟练地与周围的人类打交道。HRI目前缺乏复杂的知识管理方法和模型，以及可以被机器人与人类互动使用的知识推理能力。我们感兴趣的是：在知识管理系统中需要成功实施的是什么，机器人应该建立什么样的人类模型，以及机器人应该具有什么样的关于自己和与之交互的人类的推理能力。在这些知识的基础上，我们将研究机器人如何与人类进行社交互动。在HRI中，机器人应该执行的交互行为的显式手动编程通常是完成的，但要创建对环境或人类行为的所有变化都具有健壮性的交互非常困难。因此，我们将使用机器学习技术来学习人类在与其他人类交互时使用的交互模式，并将它们复制到人与机器人交互的上下文中。AI4HRI项目汇集了来自LAAS(法国)、不来梅大学(德国)和京都大学(日本)的三个小组，他们不仅是人工智能或人权研究所方面的世界领导者，而且在解决该项目所解决的问题方面也有非常互补的方法。通过他们的协同作用，我们将能够开发上述集成的开源架构，这是任何团队单独无法实现的。这一目标将通过相关研究人员的持续合作和会议来实现。我们相信，该项目的成果将成为实现社交互动机器人在我们附近工作的未来的一个重要里程碑。

Europe and Japan both face problems of shrinking and aging population. This raises a number of issues like missing workforce, and robots are often seen as a possible way for alleviating them. However, that would require that robots are introduced into human societies and work in direct contact with people.The field of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is concerned with the ways in which robots should interact with people in the social world. But dealing with humans is notoriously difficult and represents a huge challenge. At the same time, there are many successful applications of Artificial Intelligence techniques to increasingly complex tasks. Regardless of that, the field of HRI has largely not yet taken benefit from advanced AI techniques. Conversely, HRI can be considered as a very motivating challenge for AI, where the human is physically and mentally in the loop. The goal of the AI4HRI project will be to both develop and tightly integrate several crucial AI technologies that will allow social robots to appropriately and skillfully deal with humans around them. HRI is currently missing sophisticated knowledge management methods and models, as well as knowledge reasoning abilities that can be used by a robot interacting with humans. What we are interested in: is what needs to be implemented successfully in the knowledge management system, which kind of models of the humans the robot should build, and which kind of reasoning abilities the robot should have regarding itself and the human it interacts with. Building upon this knowledge, we will study how a robot needs to socially interact with a human. Explicit manual programming of the interaction behaviors that the robot should execute is often done in HRI, but it is very difficult to create interactions that are robust to all variations of environment or human behavior. Therefore we will use machine learning techniques to learn the interaction patterns that humans use in interactions with other humans and copy them to a human-robot interaction context. The AI4HRI project brings together three teams from LAAS (France), University of Bremen (Germany), and Kyoto University (Japan), who are not only world leaders in AI or HRI, but who also have very complementary approaches to solving the issues addressed by the project. Through their synergies, we will be able to develop the integrated open-source architecture described above, which is something that could not have been possible by any of the teams alone. The goal will be achieved through continuous collaboration and meetings of the involved researchers. We are confident that the result of this project will become an important milestone for achieving a future with socially interactive robots working in close vicinity to us.