Despite the significant advances in robotics research and development over the years, there are still no pervasive intelligent mobile robots coexisting with humans in daily environments. Among the many possible reasons as to why this is the case, this project addresses the challenge of an effective concrete interaction of mobile robots with humans, focusing on tasks which enable joint human and robot performance and require spatial interaction. The PI's vision is that project outcomes will make it possible to have multiple robots in, say, an office building available for different navigational and informational tasks, including accompanying daylong visitors through their schedule of meetings, giving tours to occasional visitors, fetching objects for and taking them to people in offices, and delivering the daily mail. To achieve this goal, she plans to transform the state of the art in robot technology for social service robotics, by introducing a novel symbiotic human-robot and robot-robot interaction paradigm that allows robots to help and be helped by humans and each other. A robot will ask humans for assistance based on self awareness of its own limitations and a utility analysis of the estimated cost and benefits of the assistance. The PI and her team will develop and evaluate a robot platform-independent and building-independent problem environment representation, along with algorithms for incremental map learning, localization and navigation, and asynchronous (multi-robot) task partitioning and planning under uncertainty with a utility analysis that includes human availability for robot helping. They will explore effective spatial interaction between mobile robots in spaces with humans, utilizing social conventions, so that people are not just obstacles from the robot's perspective. The robot science and development research will be seamlessly integrated with educational and outreach activities, as well as with principled evaluation which will include fielding a team of robots in campus buildings.
Broader Impacts: Aside from dramatically advancing the state of the art in robot technology, enabling multiple mobile robots to be part of the workspace of an office building environment will have significant educational impact relating both to robot technology and interaction with robots. Continuous, openly available robot presence in the computer science and robotics research spaces will change the nature of the relationship between researchers and their classroom research projects, by triggering synergistic collaborations and new, higher-risk experiments with lower setup cost. C Campus outreach tours will be transformed from a narrow view of the future of technology in laboratory settings to a sweeping exposure to the reality and implications of humans and robots coexisting throughout the built environment, significantly broadening inquiry and discussion about the role of interactive technology in our lives. Disseminated curricula incorporating low-cost mobile robots in the secondary school classroom will lift the robot-classroom relationship from one of build kits for very low-capability robots to one of high-level interaction design, industrial design, and discussions of human-robot relationships.
