Dominique Duhaut

The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge: Goals and Protocols for Phase 1

Traditional AI research has not given due attention to the important role that physical bodies play for agents as their interactions produce complex emergent behaviors to achieve goals in the dynamic real world. The RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge provides a good test-bed for studying how physical bodies play a significant role in realizing intelligent behaviors using the RoboCup framework [Kitano, et al., 95]. In order for the robots to play a soccer game reasonably well, a wide range of technologies needs to be integrated and a number of technical breakthroughs must be made. In this paper, we present three challenging tasks as the RoboCup Physical Agent Challenge Phase I: (1) moving the ball to the specified area (shooting, passing, and dribbling) with no, stationary, or moving obstacles, (2) catching the ball from an opponent or a teammate (receiving, goal-keeping, and intercepting), and (3) passing the ball between two players. The first two are concerned with single agent skills while the third one is related to a simple cooperative behavior. Motivation for these challenges and evaluation methodology are given.

iGrace – Emotional Computational Model for EmI Companion Robot.

A new challenge in Robotics is to create systems capable of behaviour enhancement due to their interaction with humans. Research work in psychology has shown that facial expressions play an essential role in the coordination of human conversation (Boyle et al., 1994) and constitute an essential modality in human communication. Robotherapy, a field in robotics, attempts to apply the principles of social robotics to better the psychological and physiological state of the ill, the secluded, or those with physical or mental handicaps. It seems that robots can play a role of both companionship and stimulation. They must, however, be designed with a maximum of communication capacities for such a purpose. One of the first experiments in this field of robotics was carried out with elderly people in a retirement home and Paro (Shibata, 2004). These experiments clearly showed that companion robots could give a certain moral and psychological comfort to those that are most vulnerable. In this context, the goal of the MAPH project is the realisation of a robot with the following fundamental qualities: a stuffed animal, pleasant to touch, sensors, etc. However, a robot that is too complex or too big should be avoided. The EmotiRob project, a component of the MAPH project, aims to give a robot the capacities of perception and natural language comprehension so that it can establish a formal representation of the emotional state of its interlocutor. Finally, the EmotiRob project also includes the conception of a model of the emotional states of the robot and its evolution. Following a study of the progress of research on perception and emotional synthesis, determining the most appropriate way to express emotions proved important to have a recognition rate that would be acceptable to our public. After experimentation on the subject, we have determined the minimal number of degrees of freedom necessary for a robot to express the 6 primary emotions. The second step was the definition and description of our emotional model iGrace. The experiments carried out allowed us to validate the hypotheses of the model which would be integrated into EmI – Emotional Model of Interaction. The next steps of the project will help in evaluating the robot, its expression, as well as the amount of comfort it can bring to children.

A hardware/software architecture for the control of self reconfigurable robots

Self-reconfigurable robots are built on a set of elementary modules. We focus here on a part of the realization of such system: the control system. This control is based on a processing unit developed around a CPU + FPGA computing system communicating through bluetooth. On this hardware architecture we build a software architecture that we describe and discuss the advantages and limitations.

Creating Interaction Scenarios with a New Graphical User Interface

The field of human-centered computing has known a major progress these past few years. It is admitted that this field is multidisciplinary and that the human is the core of the system. It shows two matters of concern: multidisciplinary and human. The first one reveals that each discipline plays an important role in the global research and that a collaboration between everyone is needed. The second one explains that a growing number of researches aims at making the human commitment degree increase by giving him/her a decisive role in the human-machine interaction. This paper focuses on these both concerns and presents MICE (Machines Interaction Control in their Environment) which is a system where the human is the one who makes the decisions to manage the interaction with the machines. In an ambient context, the human can decide of objects actions by creating interaction scenarios with a new visual programming language: scenL.

A collective moving algorithm in modular robotics: contribution of communication capacities

The goal of self-reconfigurable robotics is to replace a complex robot by a swarm of more simple robots called modules which can change the way they are connected, creating thus a robot which can adapt his shape to the environment in which it is evolving. The goal of this approach is to obtain a large robustness against breakdowns. In order to further increase this robustness, we can use autonomous modules which can move by their own and which can make/break connections with other modules as desired. We present a behaviour model for autonomous modules to permit the swarm to get over simple difficulties: climbing on straight walls, getting over ditches and moving down straight walls. Our model is an identical finite state machine implanted in all modules which is dedicated to the movement of autonomous modules swarm. We also present three simulations in which we study three different levels of communication, thus estimating influence of these capacities on the modules swarm speed to get over three consecutive difficulties.

Artificial companions with personality and social role

Robots and virtual characters are becoming increasingly used in our everyday life. Yet, they are still far from being able to maintain long-term social relationships with users. It also remains unclear what future users will expect from these so-called “artificial companions” in terms of social roles and personality. These questions are of importance because users will be surrounded with multiple artificial companions. These issues of social roles and personality among a group of companions are seldom tackled in user studies. In this paper, we describe a study in which 94 participants reported the social roles and personalities they would expect from groups of companions. We explain how the results give insights for the design of future groups of companions endowed with social intelligence.

Comparing child and adult language: exploring semantic constraints

Actual research on child-machine interaction indicate that children are specific with respect to various acoustic, linguistic [7], psychological, cultural and social factors. We wish to address the linguistic factor, focusing on the semantic knowledge which needs to be mastered by a computer system designed to interact with children. Our work is intentionally usage-based and application-driven. The research was conducted in the frame of the EmotiRob project, which aims at building a companion robot for children experiencing emotional difficulties. The robot is supposed to understand the emotional state of the child and respond (albeit non linguistically) adequately [1]. The interactional capacities are heavily dependent on the results of the comprehension module. The comprehension model incorporates semantic knowledge such as children-based ontologies and specific semantic associative rules. Our study is based on a corpus of Fairy Tales, which will later be compared to an oral corpus when the latter is completed. We argue that lexical knowledge and semantic associations discovered in this corpus will not differ greatly between writing and speech. Fairy Tales constitute privileged material for teachers and psychologists who argue that they play a crucial role in child socialization and structuration of concepts. To spot child language specificities, we provide a contrastive analysis of semantic preferences according to production (child VS adult authored text) and to reception (child VS adult destined text). We use a shallow ontology to compare verb constraints on specific syntactic positions in child VS adult texts. Preliminary results show, as expected, a significant difference in terms of reception, though questioning the idea that adult language is much more constraining, while differences in terms of production are less obvious and call for a detailed qualitative study.

Quadruped Robot Guided by Enhanced Vision System and Supervision Modules

Legged robots taking part in real multi-agent activities represent a very innovative challenge. This domain of research requires developments in three main areas. First the robot must be able to move efficiently in every direction in its environment. The faster the motion, the better it is. Special care must be taken when designing walking pattern transitions. Then, without any exteroceptive sensor to get information about its surroundings, the robot is blind. Fortunately, the quadruped prototype on which all experiments are carried out is equipped with a enhanced vision system and vision is the best means of getting a representation of the world that can be found in Nature. Finally the machine should be brought a minimum of intelligence since it has to manage vision information and its walking gaits by itself. When involved in cooperation, confrontation or both like in the soccer play, a high level supervision task is welcome. This paper presents detailed developments of these three points and describes how they are implemented on the real robot.

IAda: A language for robot programming based on Ada

Abstract We present a programming language for robots which we have implemented based on the Ada language. It is an interpreted language which permits dynamic configuration of software. It manipulates Ada tasks and subroutines. One of the Ada tasks is an inference engine of a logic programming language adapted to real-time constraints. We show how the conjunction of Ada tasks, to perform perception and action functions on the robot, to logic programs, for the control of these tasks, both manipulated by the IAda language, gives a powerful environment for robot programming.

Are robots our future coaches

The robots are coming in our daily live: companion robots, service robots, assistant robots, and so on. It is difficult to imagine their real roles in the future because user needs are different and there is no single model. Thus, it is important to put humans in touch with robots to understand what they may want. This paper describes an experimentation which measured acceptance and workload induced by a robot during a memory game. The purpose was to explore the robot added value in such a game with 67 persons comparing three conditions: playing with a tablet, a robot, or both a tablet and a robot. Results showed that robot was accepted in this game and that robot alone increased humans performance perception. It seemed to give them assurance. Thus results opened a surprising perspective: robots may intrinsically have a role of coach for humans.