AI Seminar: Human-Robot Interaction and Mapping with a Service Robot: Human Augmented Mapping
Date: October 29, 2008 (Wednesday) at 15:00 to 15:00
Elin Anna Topp, Centre for Autonomous Systems, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Abstract:
An issue widely discussed in robotics research is the ageing society with its consequences for care-giving institutions and opportunities for developments in the area of service robots and robot companions, and the idea of the personalised general service robot is not too far fetched. Crucial for such a service robot is the ability to navigate in its working environment, which has to be assumed an arbitrary domestic or office-like environment that is shared with human users and bystanders.
The term Human Augmented Mapping is used for a framework that allows to integrate a robotic map with human concepts. Communication about the environment can thus be facilitated. By assuming an interactive setting for the map acquisition process it is possible for the user to influence the process significantly. Personal preferences can be made part of the environment representation that is acquired by the robot. Advantages become also obvious for the mapping process itself, since in an interactive setting the robot can ask for information and resolve ambiguities with the help of the user. Thus, a scenario of a "guided tour" in which a user can ask a robot to follow and present the surroundings is assumed as the starting point for a system for the integration of robotic mapping, interaction and human environment representations.
A central point of the talk is a generic, partially hierarchical environment model, that could be applied in a topological graph structure as part of an overall experimental Human Augmented Mapping system implementation. Different aspects regarding the representation of entities of the spatial concepts used in this hierarchical model, particularly considering regions, are presented. The proposed representation is evaluated both as description of delimited regions and for the detection of transitions between them. In three user studies different aspects of the human-robot interaction issues of Human Augmented Mapping were investigated and are discussed respectively.
Bio sketch:
Elin Anna Topp is currently employed as doctoral student at the Centre for Autonomous Systems at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm. She recently defended her thesis in Computer Science on the integration of human-robot interaction into a robotic mapping process with the help of a cognitively inspired high-level environment representation. She received her M.Sc. (Diplominformatikerin) from the University of Karlsruhe in Germany and her Licentiate (Tekn Lic) from the Royal Institute of Technology, and is about to obtain her Ph.D. (Tekn Dr) from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH).
Her general interest lies in both robotics (particularly regarding spatial representations), cognitive science and human-robot interaction, envisioning systems that can communicate with their users in an appropriate way while being able to perform services for them.
Room: E:2116
URL:
http://ai.cs.lth.se/seminars.shtml
Last modified Dec 9, 2011 12:59 pm by Mikael.Antic@cs.lth.se
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