The New Robotics Age: Meeting the Physical Interactivity Challenge

Abstract

The generations of robots now being developed will increasingly touch people and their lives. They will explore, work, and interact with humans in their homes, workplaces, in new production systems, and in challenging field domains. The emerging robots will provide increased operational support in mining, underwater, and in hostile and dangerous environments. While full autonomy for the performance of advanced tasks in complex environments remains challenging, strategic intervention of a human will tremendously facilitate reliable real-time robot operations. Human-robot synergy benefits from combining the experience and cognitive abilities of the human with the strength, dependability, competence, reach, and endurance of robots. Moving beyond conventional teleoperation, the new paradigm—placing the human at the highest level of task abstraction—relies on robots with the requisite physical skills for advanced task behavior capabilities. Such connecting of humans to increasingly competent robots will fuel a wide range of new robotic applications in places where they have never gone before. This discussion focuses on robot design concepts, robot control architectures, and advanced task primitives and control strategies that bring human modeling and skill understanding to the development of safe, easy-to-use, and competent robotic systems. The presentation will highlight these developments in the context of a novel underwater robot, Ocean One, called O2, developed at Stanford in collaboration with Meka Robotics, and KAUST.