Sekou L. Remy

Trust-based compliant robot-human handovers of payloads in collaborative assembly in flexible manufacturing

A human-robot hybrid cell is developed for performing assembly in flexible manufacturing in collaboration between a robot and its human co-worker. Robot trust in human is considered, a computational model for the trust is derived, and a method to measure and display the trust in real-time is developed. The collaborative assembly includes robot-to-human handovers of payloads (assembly tools). A novel trust-based compliant handover motion planning strategy for the robot is derived. The robot varies its handover configuration and motion based on robot trust in human through kinematic redundancy with the aim of reducing potential impulse forces on human body through payload during handover. A comprehensive scheme is developed to evaluate the collaborative assembly including the trust-based handover strategy. The evaluation results show that consideration of robot trust in human during the assembly and adjustment in handover configuration and motion based on robots trust levels in human significantly improve human-robot interaction and assembly performance through increasing safety, human trust in robot, handover success rate, and the overall assembly efficiency by 20%, 37.58%, 30% and 6.73% respectively and reducing cognitive workload by 25.63%, with a minor reduction in the handover efficiency by 1.87%.

Quantifying the impact of standards when hosting robotic simulations in the cloud

Cloud computing has the ability to transform simulation by providing access to computation remotely. The transformations are not without cost however. The physics-based simulations required in robotics are sensitive to timing, and given the complexity of the operating environments, there are many reasons for a roboticist to be concerned. In this work we explore the impact of the cloud, web, and networking standards on the control of a simulated robot. Our results show that, on average, there is a noticeable impact on performance, but this impact is not statistically significant in five of the six considered scenarios. These results provide support for efforts that seek to use the cloud to support meaningful simulations. Our results are not globally applicable to robotics simulation. When using cloud-hosted simulations, roboticists yield fine tuned control of the environment, and as such there are some simulations are simply not viable candidates for this treatment.

Robotics for All Ages: A Standard Robotics Curriculum for K-16

The introduction of robotics in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education is quickly becoming a very polarizing topic. As a discipline, robotics research is tackling new and challenging problems that resonate with public perception and also provide exciting and fun opportunities to see science in action. The exposure of students at various levels to robotics is controversial since many view it as a fad, and others rightly indicate that there is still a need for coherent analysis of robotics in the classroom to assess the impact on education and engagement. In this work, we argue that for robotics to be effectively incorporated into the educational pipeline, there is a need for a comprehensive robotics curriculum. Such a curriculum should be designed to be intentionally flexible; however, its development would enable principled study in a variety of learning environments and over the long term. We propose the nature of the standard curriculum and present recommendations on how it can be practically applied. Our aim in the long term is to provide resources that will elevate robotics education. The existence of these resources will advance the current level of understanding from anecdotal and short-lived inquiry so that robotics education can be evidence-based and sustainable.

Robot-Human Handovers Based on Trust

We present a new approach to payload handovers between robots and humans in collaborative human-co-robot operations. The key innovation is the incorporation of robot trust (in the human) in the underlying robot motion planning algorithm. Using a weighted Jacobian pseudoinverse algorithm, the robot motions are varied (trading off collision risk against task efficiency) based on the current value of trust. The targeted application is small-scale manufacturing, but the approach can be applied to many forms of robot-human handovers and interactions.

User Experience Evaluation Towards Cooperative Brain-Robot Interaction

Brain-Robot Interaction (BRI) research has mainly focused on analyzing system’s performance through objective data. Recently research on Brain-Computer Interfaces (BCI) has begun moving towards applications that go beyond the lab and medical settings. To create successful BRI applications in the future for healthy users User Experience (UX) should be evaluated throughout the development process. This paper discusses single and cooperative BRI systems and analyzes affective and objective task performance data collected while cognitively controlling a robot. Also this paper discusses how this approach can benefit future research on the usability of BRI applications.

An Empirical Evaluation of the Effects of IoT Messaging Protocols

In this paper, we evaluate the performance of feedback control with different publish and subscribe architectures. Specifically we look to evaluate the difference between ROS, MQTT, and Kafka under the three network conditions. Our results show that latency alone can not be used to assess performance of a real time control system.

A human-like approach to learning from examples

In this paper, we describe the system components, present the implemented architecture, and show the effect of an interactive learning system in action. We evaluate the systems ability to learning with two datasets, one synthetic and the other from writing samples gathered from human subjects. With both datasets, the respective test and training sets are the same so as to permit the process of interactive learning to be observed as it occurs. At its core, this learning approach transforms sensory input and actuator output into rank P = 1 spaces, and uses learn a probabilistic mapping between these two “states” to perform the target task. In the future P >1 will be used internally, and we conclude this work with a brief treatment on why we believe this to be a useful trajectory.

Design implications for networked controllers using web standards in cloud robotics

Computation, networking and controls are in the midst of a true transformation. Previously it was assumed that delays in network communication would inhibit control systems from leveraging networked resources such as remote compute power. Now, industrial and residential applications of the Internet of Things force us to revisit principled deployment and support of distributed sensing and actuation. Web standards provide key resources in the development and support of flexible distributed systems, however the conventional wisdom is that their use adds to the network delay and uncertainty, and makes a difficult control problem intractable. We quantify the effect of an important set of web standards (both formal and informal) in the control of physical systems. The results reported in this paper indicate that although the use of web standards provides an effective path to flexible implementation of distributed control, there are software design choices that impact the observed performance in significant ways.

Extending access to personalized verbal feedback about robots for programming students with visual impairments

This work demonstrates improvements in a software tool that provides verbal feedback about executed robot code. Designed for programming students with visual impairments, the tool is now multi-lingual and no longer requires locally installed text-to-speech software. These developments use cloud and web standards to provide greater flexibility in generating personalized verbal feedback.