*** This award, in the Small Grants for Exploratory Research mode, will explore the balance between human operator supervision and computer automation in a human-robot cooperation. The research will do this by finding ways to combine human high-level visual perception and task- understanding capabilities with a robot's low-level vision and positioning precision, to optimize the performance of the human-machine team in vision and manipulation processes. The focus of this initial exploration is to determine ways to combine prior domain knowledge and models, and overall vision and scene perception capabilities of the human operator, with precision and high-speed machine operation in execution of complex robotic tasks. This investigation offers promise of identifying new approaches to allocating human and machine roles in cooperative endeavors, which will be important in a wide range of emerging applications.***
