Holly A. Yanco

Awareness in human-robot interactions

This paper provides a set of definitions that form a framework for describing the types of awareness that humans have of robot activities and the knowledge that robots have of the commands given them by humans. As a case study, we applied this human-robot interaction (HRI) awareness framework to our analysis of the HRI approaches used at an urban search and rescue competition. We determined that most of the critical incidents (e.g., damage done by robots to the test arena) were directly attributable to lack of one or more kinds of HRI awareness.

Wheelesley: A Robotic Wheelchair System: Indoor Navigation and User Interface

Many people in wheelchairs are unable to control a powered wheelchair with the standard joystick interface. A robotic wheelchair can provide users with driving assistance, taking over low-level navigation to allow its user to travel efficiently and with greater ease. Our robotic wheelchair system, Wheelesley, consists of a standard powered wheelchair with an on-board computer, sensors and a graphical user interface. This paper describes the indoor navigation system and the customizable user interface.

Classifying human-robot interaction: an updated taxonomy

This paper extends taxonomy of human-robot interaction (HRI) introduced in 2002 to include additional categories as well as updates to the categories from the original taxonomy. New classifications include measures of the social nature of the task (human interaction roles and human-robot physical proximity), task type, and robot morphology.

Evaluation of human-robot interaction awareness in search and rescue

In this paper we report on the analysis of critical incidents during an urban search and rescue robot competition where critical incidents are defined as a situation where the robot could potentially cause damage to itself, the victim, or the environment. We look at the features present in the human-robot interface that contributed to success in different tasks needed in urban search and rescue and present guidelines for human-robot interaction design.

Improved interfaces for human-robot interaction in urban search and rescue

Studies of human-robot interaction have shown that operators rely heavily upon the video stream, to the exclusion of all other information on the interface. We have created a new interface that fuses information on and around the video window to exploit this fact.

Impact of robot failures and feedback on real-time trust

Prior work in human trust of autonomous robots suggests the timing of reliability drops impact trust and control allocation strategies. However, trust is traditionally measured post-run, thereby masking the real-time changes in trust, reducing sensitivity to factors like inertia, and subjecting the measure to biases like the primacy-recency effect. Likewise, little is known on how feedback of robot confidence interacts in real-time with trust and control allocation strategies. An experiment to examine these issues showed trust loss due to early reliability drops is masked in traditional post-run measures, trust demonstrates inertia, and feedback alters allocation strategies independent of trust. The implications of specific findings on development of trust models and robot design are also discussed.

Essential features of telepresence robots

Telepresence robots are mobile robot platforms capable of providing two way audio and video communication. Recently there has been a surge in companies designing telepresence robots. We conducted a series of user studies at Google in Mountain View with two different commercially available telepresence robots. Based on the data collected from these user studies, we present a set of guidelines for designing telepresence robots. These essential guidelines pertain to video, audio, user interface, physical features, and autonomous behaviors.

Analysis of natural gestures for controlling robot teams on multi-touch tabletop surfaces

Multi-touch technologies hold much promise for the command and control of mobile robot teams. To improve the ease of learning and usability of these interfaces, we conducted an experiment to determine the gestures that people would naturally use, rather than the gestures they would be instructed to use in a pre-designed system. A set of 26 tasks with differing control needs were presented sequentially on a DiamondTouch to 31 participants. We found that the task of controlling robots exposed unique gesture sets and considerations not previously observed, particularly in desktop-like applications. In this paper, we present the details of these findings, a taxonomy of the gesture set, and guidelines for designing gesture sets for robot control.

LASSOing HRI: analyzing situation awareness in map-centric and video-centric interfaces

Good situation awareness (SA) is especially necessary when robots and their operators are not collocated, such as in urban search and rescue (USAR). This paper compares how SA is attained in two systems: one that has an emphasis on video and another that has an emphasis on a three-dimensional map. We performed a within-subjects study with eight USAR domain experts. To analyze the utterances made by the participants, we developed a SA analysis technique, called LASSO, which includes five awareness categories: location, activities, surroundings, status, and overall mission. Using our analysis technique, we show that a map-centric interface is more effective in providing good location and status awareness while a video-centric interface is more effective in providing good surroundings and activities awareness.

Rescuing interfaces: A multi-year study of human-robot interaction at the AAAI Robot Rescue Competition

This paper presents results from three years of studying human-robot interaction in the context of the AAAI Robot Rescue Competition. We discuss our study methodology, the competitors’ systems and performance, and suggest ways to improve human-robot interaction in urban search and rescue (USAR) as well as other remote robot operations.