INTRODUCTION Human-robot interaction (HRI) is a discipline investigating the factors affecting the interactions between humans and robots. It is important to evaluate how the design of interfaces affect the human’s ability to perform tasks effectively and efficiently when working with a robot. By understanding the effects of interface design on human performance, workload, and situation awarene...

Independence of the people in need in their activities of daily living becomes a matter of vital importance to any society in the years to come. As an approach to achieve independence, this paper addresses the problem of controlling assistive home environment emphasizing human-friendly human-machine interaction. To provide inhabitants with easily accessible, convenient, and cost-effective envir...

Human-robot interfaces for interacting with hundreds of autonomous robots must be very different from single-robot interfaces. The central design challenge is developing techniques to maintain, program, and interact with the robots without having to handle them individually. This requires robots that can support hands-free operation, which drives many other aspects of the design. This paper pre...

As part of a DARPA/NSF Study on Human-Robot Interaction, an interdisciplinary workshop was conceived, which would allow roboticists to interact with psychologists, sociologists, cognitive scientists, communication experts and human-computer interaction specialists to discuss common interests in the field of Human-Robot Interaction, and to establish a dialogue across the disciplines for future c...

In the field of service robotics, robots serve and assist human beings. It is natural for humans to directly interact with the robot via tactile interfaces. This paper introduces several kinds of tactile interactions between a user and the robot as well as interactions of the robot with the environment. All interactions are implemented in a single paradigm: Forces measured from tactile sensors ...

The design and control of robots for effective human interaction requires an understanding of the sensory and motor organization of the human half of the human-robot system. Below we describe three projects in haptic display and human augmentation robotics, in collaboration with faculty in psychology and biomedical engineering. Fingertip Haptic Interface “Fingertip haptics” refers to the direct...

In this paper, we present the preliminary concepts regarding the dynamic emotion-based human-robot collaboration in an assembly task in manufacturing. We employ an anthropomorphic robot with emotion display abilities to collaborate with a human for the assembly task. The human serves as a supervisor and a co-worker when collaborating with the robot for the task. We consider situations when ther...

As robots are expected to interact with humans in social environments, like hospitals, schools or at home, a comfortable and intuitive way of communication has to be established. The ability to display emotions is a key feature in human communication. In recent years huge progress was made in the effort to express emotions with humanoid robots, mainly with facial expressions. For expressions ba...

Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is a constantly growing multidisciplinary area rich of cues for advanced researches and technology transfers. It plays a fundamental role in the development of robots that operate in an open environment and cooperate with humans. This task requires the development of techniques that allow inexpert users to use their robots in an efficient and safe way, using an int...

Some people regard the personal mobile robot as a candidate for the next digital revolution as it might become a future ubiquitous tool and everyday partner of humans. This new “socio-emotional” robot is supposed to conduct dialogue, to develop social competencies and to support users in everyday life. In this chapter, I sketch out the epistemological, ontological and techno-material groundings...