• Social Robots • What's out There, What's Coming • What They're Good

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

• Social Robots • What's out There, What's Coming • What They're Good Belinda Ward Project Manager – Humanoid Robotics • Social Robots • what’s out there, what’s coming • What they’re good at now • and not so good at • Socially assistive robotics: helping through social interaction • How can they be useful in healthcare? • Social robots - what’s “easy” • and what isn’t • Lessons for practical deployments Masayoshi Son Softbank Founder and CEO Information Revolution – Happiness for Everyone ST Solutions Australia Social robots are coming… ASIMO ROBOTHESPIAN HUBO ROMEO NINEBOT HOVIS MIIM NAO iCUB OP2 TAPIA ZENBO SANBOT AIDO But what can they do? BAXTER PR2 REEM (CHIP) JACO PIONEER MANIPULATOR TIAGO Beyond Entertainment / Novelty Socially assistive robotics Helping through social interaction, rather than physical action • Monitoring • Coaching / training • Motivation • Companionship Scenario 1: • Pepper responds to frequently asked questions • Will people in a public hospital be comfortable interacting with a robot? Scenario 2: • Pepper surveys knowledge and attitudes about the flu virus and vaccinations. • Can Pepper be effective at delivering public health information? Pepper – Skills and experience Already good at More difficult • Attracting attention • Navigation • Recognising people • Understanding environment • Tracking faces • Learning about an unknown • Understanding human environment speech* • Scripted conversation • Understanding human movement • • Movement Understanding human behaviour • Contextual (situational) conversation Skills for social robots Text to speech Question - Answer Contextual dialogue Scripted interactions Free-form dialogue Constrained speech recognition Understanding emotions Facial recognition Understanding intent One-on-one interactions Multi-party conversation Easy Hard doors stairs Moving daylight Avoiding static obstacles Building a map Semantic understanding Navigating known Updating a map environment Learning Manipulation Object recognition Grasping A word of caution Lessons from the field • Technology champion on the ground is critical • You also need champions in high places • expectation management is important • Your wifi will cause you headaches • make friends with your IT providers • IT security will be paranoid • Keep it simple and secure • Everyone will be paranoid • Their worst fears are unfounded • Privacy fears • Lessons for practical deployments.
Recommended publications
  • Task-Space Control Interface for Softbank Humanoid Robots and Its
    Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications Anastasia Bolotnikova, Pierre Gergondet, Arnaud Tanguy, Sébastien Courtois, Abderrahmane Kheddar To cite this version: Anastasia Bolotnikova, Pierre Gergondet, Arnaud Tanguy, Sébastien Courtois, Abderrahmane Kheddar. Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications. IEEE/SICE 13th International Symposium on System Integration (SII 2021), Jan 2021, Online conference (originally: Iwaki, Fukushima), Japan. pp.560-565, 10.1109/IEEECONF49454.2021.9382685. hal-02919367v3 HAL Id: hal-02919367 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02919367v3 Submitted on 8 Oct 2020 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Task-Space Control Interface for SoftBank Humanoid Robots and its Human-Robot Interaction Applications Anastasia Bolotnikova1;2, Pierre Gergondet4, Arnaud Tanguy3,Sebastien´ Courtois1, Abderrahmane Kheddar3;2;4 Abstract— We present an open-source software interface, Real robot called mc naoqi, that allows to perform whole-body task-space Quadratic Programming based control, implemented in mc rtc Fixed frame rate low-level actuator commands Robot sensors readings from framework, on the SoftBank Robotics Europe humanoid robots. Other robot device commands low-level memory fast access We describe the control interface, associated robot description mc_naoqi_dcm packages, robot modules and sample whole-body controllers.
    [Show full text]
  • The Sphingidae (Lepidoptera) of the Philippines
    ©Entomologischer Verein Apollo e.V. Frankfurt am Main; download unter www.zobodat.at Nachr. entomol. Ver. Apollo, Suppl. 17: 17-132 (1998) 17 The Sphingidae (Lepidoptera) of the Philippines Willem H o g e n e s and Colin G. T r e a d a w a y Willem Hogenes, Zoologisch Museum Amsterdam, Afd. Entomologie, Plantage Middenlaan 64, NL-1018 DH Amsterdam, The Netherlands Colin G. T readaway, Entomologie II, Forschungsinstitut Senckenberg, Senckenberganlage 25, D-60325 Frankfurt am Main, Germany Abstract: This publication covers all Sphingidae known from the Philippines at this time in the form of an annotated checklist. (A concise checklist of the species can be found in Table 4, page 120.) Distribution maps are included as well as 18 colour plates covering all but one species. Where no specimens of a particular spe­ cies from the Philippines were available to us, illustrations are given of specimens from outside the Philippines. In total we have listed 117 species (with 5 additional subspecies where more than one subspecies of a species exists in the Philippines). Four tables are provided: 1) a breakdown of the number of species and endemic species/subspecies for each subfamily, tribe and genus of Philippine Sphingidae; 2) an evaluation of the number of species as well as endemic species/subspecies per island for the nine largest islands of the Philippines plus one small island group for comparison; 3) an evaluation of the Sphingidae endemicity for each of Vane-Wright’s (1990) faunal regions. From these tables it can be readily deduced that the highest species counts can be encountered on the islands of Palawan (73 species), Luzon (72), Mindanao, Leyte and Negros (62 each).
    [Show full text]
  • AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION with NAO David Lavy
    AUTONOMOUS NAVIGATION WITH NAO David Lavy and Travis Marshall Boston University Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering 8 Saint Mary's Street Boston, MA 02215 www.bu.edu/ece December 9, 2015 Technical Report No. ECE-2015-06 Summary We introduce a navigation system for the humanoid robot NAO that seeks to find a ball, navigate to it, and kick it. The proposed method uses data acquired using the 2 cameras mounted on the robot to estimate the position of the ball with respect to the robot and then to navigate towards it. Our method is also capable of searching for the ball if is not within the robots immediate range of view or if at some point, NAO loses track of it. Variations of this method are currently used by different universities around the world in the international robotic soccer competition called Robocup. This project was completed within EC720 graduate course entitled \Digital Video Processing" at Boston University in the fall of 2015. i Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Literature Review 1 3 Problem Solution 2 3.1 Find position of the ball . .3 3.2 Positioning the robot facing the ball . 10 3.3 Walking to the ball . 11 3.4 Kicking the ball . 12 4 Implementation 12 4.1 Image Acquisition . 13 4.2 Finding Contours and Circles . 13 4.3 Navigation and kicking for NAO . 13 5 Experimental Results 14 5.1 Ball identification results by method . 14 5.2 Confusion matrices . 14 5.3 Centering NAO to face the ball . 15 6 Conclusion and Future Work 16 7 Appendix 17 7.1 NAO features .
    [Show full text]
  • Evaluating the Nao Robot in the Role of Personal Assistant: the Effect of Gender in Robot Performance Evaluation †
    Proceedings Evaluating the Nao Robot in the Role of Personal Assistant: The Effect of Gender in Robot Performance Evaluation † Adrian Vega *, Kryscia Ramírez-Benavides, Luis A. Guerrero and Gustavo López Centro de Investigaciones en Tecnologías de la Información y Comunicación, Universidad de Costa Rica, 2060 San José, Costa Rica; [email protected] (K.R.-B.); [email protected] (L.A.G.); [email protected] (G.L.) * Correspondence: [email protected] † Presented at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing and Ambient Intelligence UCAmI 2019, Toledo, Spain, 2–5 December 2019. Published: 20 November 2019 Abstract: By using techniques such as the Wizard of Oz (WoZ) and video capture, this paper evaluated the performance of the Nao Robot in the role of a personal assistant, which was valuated alongside the impact of the assigned gender (male/female) in the perceived performance of the robot assistant. Within a sample size of 39 computer sciences students, this study assessed criteria such as: perceived enjoyment, intention to use, perceived sociability, trust, intelligence, animacy, anthropomorphism, and sympathy, utilizing testing tools such as Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) and Godspeed Questionnaire (GSQ). These methods identified a significant effect of the gender assigned to the robot in variables such as intelligence and sympathy. Keywords: human–robot interaction; HRI; HCI; UTAUT; GSQ; WoZ; gender 1. Introduction Starting as manufacturing machines, robots have opened to a wider application of areas such as education [1–3], personal assistance [4], health [5,6], and many others. Multiple research studies have described different elements to consider in the design of interactions with socially intelligent robots [6–9].
    [Show full text]
  • Many Faced Robot - Design and Manufacturing of a Parametric, Modular and Open Source Robot Head
    Many Faced Robot - Design and Manufacturing of a Parametric, Modular and Open Source Robot Head Metodi Netzev1, Quentin Houbre1, Eetu Airaksinen1, Alexandre Angleraud1 and Roel Pieters1 Abstract— Robots developed for social interaction and care show great promise as a tool to assist people. While the functionality and capability of such robots is crucial in their acceptance, the visual appearance should not be underesti- mated. Current designs of social robots typically can not be altered and remain the same throughout the life-cycle of the robot. Moreover, customization to different end-users is rarely taken into account and often alterations are strictly prohibited due to the closed-source designs of the manufacturer. The current trend of low-cost manufacturing (3D printing) and open-source technology, however, open up new opportunities for third parties to be involved in the design process. In this work, we propose a development platform based on FreeCAD that offers a parametric, modular and open-source design tool specifically aimed at robot heads. Designs can be generated by altering different features in the tool, which automatically Fig. 1. Different end-users of social robots require different features and design. The designs shown here are generated by the parametric and modular reconfigures the head. In addition, we present several design development platform, proposed in this work. Left design shows a robot approaches that can be integrated in the design to achieve head with wooden facial covering. Right design shows a robot head with different functionalities (face and skin aesthetics, component more humanoid characteristics. Both designs can be generated by changing assembly), while still relying on 3D printing technology.
    [Show full text]
  • Examining the Use of Robots As Teacher Assistants in UAE
    Volume 20, 2021 EXAMINING THE USE OF ROBOTS AS TEACHER ASSISTANTS IN UAE CLASSROOMS: TEACHER AND STUDENT PERSPECTIVES Mariam Alhashmi* College of Education, Zayed University, [email protected] Abu Dhabi, UAE Omar Mubin Senior Lecturer in Human Computer [email protected] Interaction, Sydney, Australia Rama Baroud Part-Time Research Assistant [email protected] * Corresponding author ABSTRACT Aim/Purpose This study sought to understand the views of both teachers and students on the usage of humanoid robots as teaching assistants in a specifically Arab context. Background Social robots have in recent times penetrated the educational space. Although prevalent in Asia and some Western regions, the uptake, perception and ac- ceptance of educational robots in the Arab or Emirati region is not known. Methodology A total of 20 children and 5 teachers were randomly selected to comprise the sample for this study, which was a qualitative exploration executed using fo- cus groups after an NAO robot (pronounced now) was deployed in their school for a day of revision sessions. Contribution Where other papers on this topic have largely been based in other countries, this paper, to our knowledge, is the first to examine the potential for the inte- gration of educational robots in the Arab context. Findings The students were generally appreciative of the incorporation of humanoid robots as co-teachers, whereas the teachers were more circumspect, express- ing some concerns and noting a desire to better streamline the process of bringing robots to the classroom. Recommendations We found that the malleability of the robot’s voice played a pivotal role in the for Practitioners acceptability of the robot, and that generally students did well in smaller Accepting Editor Minh Q.
    [Show full text]
  • Advance Your Students Into the Future Secondary Education
    ADVANCE YOUR STUDENTS INTO THE FUTURE SECONDARY EDUCATION www.active-robots.com/aldebaran STEP INTO THE FUTURE CLASSROOM Robotics is the fastest growing industry and most advanced technology used in education and research. The NAO humanoid robot is the ideal platform for MOTIVATE STUDENTS teaching or researching in Science and Technology. — IMPROVE LEARNING By using our NAO robotics platform, instructors and researchers EFFECTIVENESS stay current with major technical and commercial breakthroughs in — TEACH A JOB-CREATING FIELD programming and applied research. WHY STUDY A HUMANOID ROBOT? MAJOR INNOVATION MULTIDISCIPLINARY PLATFORM ROBOT & JOB-CREATING FIELD FOR TEACHING & RESEARCH FASCINATION — — — After Computer and Internet, Robotics is the new Computer sciences, mechanics, electronics, Humanoid robots have always fascinated people technological revolution. With ageing population and control are already at the core of the NAO especially students with new applications and and labour shortage, humanoid robots will be platform. Our curriculum used in conjunction incredible inventions. Now technology has made one of the solutions for people assistance thanks with NAO allows students to develop a structured a huge leap forward. Stemming from 6 years to their humanoid shape adapted to a world approach to finding solutions and adapting a wide of research, NAO is one of the most advanced made for humans. Educate students today using range of cross-sectional educational content. One humanoid robots ever created. He is fully the NAO platform for opportunities in robotics, example is for the instructor to assign students programmable, open and autonomous. engineering, computer science and technology. In to program NAO to grasp an object and lift it.
    [Show full text]
  • Humanoid Navigation and Heavy Load Transportation in a Cluttered Environment Antoine Rioux, Wael Suleiman
    Humanoid navigation and heavy load transportation in a cluttered environment Antoine Rioux, Wael Suleiman To cite this version: Antoine Rioux, Wael Suleiman. Humanoid navigation and heavy load transportation in a cluttered environment. 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Sep 2015, Hambourg, Germany. pp.2180-2186, 10.1109/IROS.2015.7353669. hal-01521584 HAL Id: hal-01521584 https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-01521584 Submitted on 12 May 2017 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. Humanoid Navigation and Heavy Load Transportation in a Cluttered Environment Antoine Rioux and Wael Suleiman Abstract— Although in recent years several studies aimed at the navigation of robots in cluttered environments, just a few have addressed the problem of robots navigating while moving a large or heavy object. This is especially useful when transporting loads with variable weights and shapes without having to change the robot hardware. On one hand, a major advantage of using a humanoid robot to move an object is that it has arms to firmly grasp it and control it. On the other hand, humanoid robots tend to have higher drift than their wheeled counterparts as well as having significant lateral swing while walking, which propagates to anything they carry.
    [Show full text]
  • Introducing the New Generation of Nao Robot
    INTRODUCING THE NEW GENERATION OF NAO ROBOT SoftBank Robotics Europe Outline 01 INTRODUCTION OF NAO6 02 NAO6 VALUE PROPOSITION & BENEFITS 03 SOFTBANK ROBOTICS QUICK VIEW NAO6 INTRODUCTION NAO6 INTRODUCTION NAO6 IMPROVEMENTS MARKET SECTORS SoftBank Robotics Europe THE 6TH GENERATION OF HUMANOID ROBOT NAO II Attractive programmable platform: create a unique human-robot interaction experience and leverage it to a new level II DETECTION 2 5-megapixels cameras 58 cm ACOUSTIC COMPUTING 4 omnidirectional microphones CPU ATOM E3845 2 loudspeakers Quad core 1.91 GHz 4 GB DDR3 RAM 32 GB SSD CONNECTIVITY Bluetooth – Ethernet - Wi-Fi SPEECH RECOGNITION More than 20 Languages GRACEFUL BODY MOVEMENTS 25 degrees of freedom FALL MANAGER Detects falls & trigger the protection FALL RECOVERY Able to stand up alone EXPLORATION 4 sonars to detect obstacles ADAPTIVE WALK 8x Force Sensitive Resistors 5,5 kg NAO6, 6 MAJOR AREAS OF HARDWARE IMPROVEMENT II A continuous augmentation of robot performance: enriched package for a greater product II 1 - POWER 1 - POWER 6 CPU – ATOM Z530 ➔ E3845 NAO benefits from the progress made on Pepper which Memory: 8GB SDCard ➔ 32GB SSD makes it more powerful. 2 - VISION Camera – Aptina MT114 1.3Mpix ➔ 3 – AUDIO 2 - VISION Omnivision 5640 5Mpix Cardioid mic ➔ 6 Omnidirectional mic With its new cameras, NAO better detects people. + Audio codec Dual stream of the top and bottom cameras is now supported. 3 - AUDIO NAO6 hears and understands a lot better making dialog a full part of the interactions. 4 – MOTION Motors - PortEscape 16 GT ➔ PortEscape 16 GT MP 4 - MOTION Thanks to its new motors, NAO6 can move longer without overheating.
    [Show full text]
  • An Interactive Tool for Designing Complex Robot Motion Patterns
    An Interactive Tool for Designing Complex Robot Motion Patterns Georgios Pierris and Michail G. Lagoudakis Abstract— Low-cost robots with a large number of degrees KME was originally designed for and currently supports of freedom are becoming increasingly popular, nevertheless only the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot (RoboCup edi- their programming is still a domain for experts. This paper tion) [1], which features a total of 21 degrees of freedom, and introduces the Kouretes Motion Editor (KME), an interactive software tool for designing complex motion patterns on robots its simulated model on the Webots simulator [2]. However, with many degrees of freedom using intuitive means. KME the main features of KME could be easily adapted for allows for a TCP/IP connection to a real or simulated robot, other robots and the tool itself could be used for a variety over which various robot poses can be communicated to or from of purposes, such as providing complex motion patterns the robot and manipulated locally using the KME graphical as starting points for learning algorithms and supporting user interface. This portability and flexibility enables the user to work under different modes, with different robots, using educational activities in robot programming courses. KME different host machines. KME was originally designed for and has been employed successfully by Kouretes, the RoboCup currently supports only the Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot team of the Technical University of Crete in Greece, for which features a total of 21 degrees of freedom. KME has designing various special actions (stand-up, ball kicks, goalie been employed successfully by Kouretes, the RoboCup team of falls), thanks to which the team ranked in the 3rd place at the Technical University of Crete, for designing various special actions, thanks to which the team ranked in the 3rd place at the RoboCup 2008 competition (Standard Platform League).
    [Show full text]
  • State of the Art: Bipedal Robots for Lower Limb Rehabilitation
    applied sciences Review State of the Art: Bipedal Robots for Lower Limb Rehabilitation Xiong Yang 1,†, Haotian She 2,†, Haojian Lu 1, Toshio Fukuda 2 and Yajing Shen 1,3,* 1 Department of Mechanical and Biomedical Engineering, University of Hong Kong, Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong 999077, China; [email protected] (X.Y.); [email protected] (H.L.) 2 Beijing Institute of Technology, No.5 Yard, Zhong Guan Cun South Street, Haidian District, Beijing 100000, China; [email protected] (H.S.); [email protected] (T.F.) 3 Centre for Robotics and Automation, CityU Shenzhen Research Institute, Shenzhen 518000, China * Correspondence: [email protected]; Tel.: +852-3442-2045 † These authors contributed equally to this work. Received: 5 October 2017; Accepted: 3 November 2017; Published: 16 November 2017 Abstract: The bipedal robot is one of the most attractive robots types given its similarity to the locomotion of human beings and its ability to assist people to walk during rehabilitation. This review summarizes the chronological historical development of bipedal robots and introduces some current popular bipedal robots age. Then, the basic theory-stability control and key technology-motion planning of bipedal robots are introduced and analyzed. Bipedal robots have a wide range of applications in the service, education, entertainment, and other industries. After that, we specifically discuss the applications of bipedal robots in lower limb rehabilitation, including wearable exoskeleton robots, rehabilitation equipment, soft exoskeleton robots, and unpowered exoskeleton robots, and their control methods. Lastly, the future development and the challenges in this field are discussed.
    [Show full text]
  • Robot Umanoidi E Tecniche Di Interazione Naturale Per Servizi Di Accoglienza Ed Informazioni
    POLITECNICO DI TORINO Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Ingegneria Informatica Tesi di Laurea Magistrale Robot umanoidi e tecniche di interazione naturale per servizi di accoglienza ed informazioni Relatori Prof. Fabrizio Lamberti Ing. Federica Bazzano Candidato Simon Dario Mezzomo Dicembre 2017 Quest’opera è stata rilasciata con licenza Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 4.0 Internazionale. Per leggere una copia della licenza visita il sito web http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ o spedisci una lettera a Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. Ringraziamenti Grazie a tutti quelli che mi sono stati vicino durante questo lungo percorso che mi ha portato al tanto atteso traguardo della laurea. A tutta la famiglia che mi ha sempre sostenuto anche nei momenti più difficili. Agli amici di casa e di università Andrea, Hervé, Jacopo, Maurizio, Didier, Marco, Matteo, Luca, Thomas, Nicola, Simone che hanno condiviso numerose esperienze. A tutti i colleghi di lavoro Edoardo, Francesco, Emanuele, Gianluca, Gabriele, Nicolas, Rebecca, Chiara, Allegra. E a tutti quelli di cui mi sarò sicuramente scordato. iii Sommario L’obiettivo di questo lavoro di tesi è quello di esplorare l’uso di robot umanoidi nel- l’ambito della robotica di servizio per applicazioni che possono essere utili all’uomo e di analizzarne l’effettiva utilità. In particolare, è stata analizzata l’interazione con un robot umanoide (generalmente chiamato receptionist) che accoglie gli utenti e fornisce loro, su richiesta, delle indicazioni per raggiungere il luogo in cui questi si vogliono recare. L’innovazione rispetto allo stato dell’arte in materia consiste nell’integrare le in- dicazioni vocali fornite all’utente con delle indicazioni che mostrano il percorso da seguire su una mappa posta di fronte al robot.
    [Show full text]