Developing robot assistants with communicative cues for safe, fluent HRI

Abstract

The Collaborative Advanced Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CARIS) laboratory at the University of British Columbia studies the development of robotic systems that are capable of autonomous human-robot interaction. This chapter will provide an overview of our laboratory’s activities and methodologies. We first discuss a recently-concluded multi-institutional three year project to develop autonomous robot assistants which aid in assembly operations at manufacturing facilities. Next we discuss the primary methodology employed by our laboratory, by which we identify communicative cues used in interactions between people, describe these cues in detail, then implement and test them on robots. This is followed by an overview of recent communicative cue studies carried out by our group and our collaborators. We conclude by discussing current and future work.