Thesis Details
Human-Robot Interaction: Advanced Task-centered Interfaces for Non-Expert Users
Recent years brought a growing trend of deploying robots in novel applications where they are not only supposed to co-exist with and work next to humans but to actually closely collaborate with them on shared complex tasks. Capabilities of the robotic systems need to be substantially expanded in order to make the close, rich as well as natural human-robot interaction possible. Indeed, the interaction will not only happen between caged robots and highly specialized experts any more. More and more often, it will interconnect safe and interactive robots with non-expert users with various background. Consequently, the amazingly complex machines, that the current robots are, will become even more complex. This poses further challenges for the design of their user interfaces.The objective of this thesis is to research and develop solutions for the close interaction between non-expert users and complex robots. The research was done in two different contexts: assistive service and industrial collaborative robots. Although these two domains have diverse requirements, related concepts could be used when designing the human-robot interaction. To cope with limitations of the current approaches, a novel method for task-centered interaction has been proposed. The most important aspects of the method are the utilization of mixed reality and robot-integrated capabilities, communication of the robot's inner state, context sensitivity, and usage of task-appropriate modalities. For each of the two mentioned domains, a user interface was designed and implemented. Both interfaces were successfully evaluated with non-expert users, who were able to carry out non-trivial tasks in cooperation with a robot. The reported evaluation provides an evidence that the realized method significantly improves the close human-robot interaction, which had not been entirely possible with previous approaches. The method's key characteristics provide guidelines for new designs of next user interfaces in the collaborative robotics.
Human-robot interaction; teleoperation; remote manipulation; colllaborative robots; simplified programming.
@phdthesis{FITPT552,
author = "Zden\v{e}k Materna",
type = "Ph.D. thesis",
title = "Human-Robot Interaction: Advanced Task-centered Interfaces for Non-Expert Users",
school = "Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Information Technology",
year = 2019,
location = "Brno, CZ",
language = "english",
url = "https://www.fit.vut.cz/study/phd-thesis/552/"
}