Prof. Holly Yanco, UMass Lowell Robotics Lab director, and Dr. Jill Drury of MITRE Corporation will be hosting a 5 hour tutorial on "The Use of HCI and HRI to Improve Emergency Response" on Monday, May 17 at the 2010 International Symposium on Collaborative Technologies and Systems (CTS 2010).

Abstract:

Human-robot interaction (HRI) can be viewed as a collaborative effort, even when a single human is interacting with only one robot.  Humans and robots are unequal partners, yet they are nevertheless collaborators in performing vital missions such as elder care, bomb disposal, or search and rescue.  In fact, some of the theory and techniques from the computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) domain has been trickling into the HRI discipline, such as common ground theory (Stubbs, 2007) and awareness of remote team members (e.g., Drury et al., 2003).  We designed this tutorial to introduce collaboration and CSCW researchers to HRI, using case studies from assistive robotics and emergency response and emphasizing promising HRI research areas that may be of interest to the collaboration community.   In this 5-hour tutorial, we will provide an overview of the current status of research in interactions with robots, including humans interacting in different roles and via different modalities.  We will also include an overview of the many types of robots and the degrees of autonomy that they possess.  We will critique various user interface designs, describing the positive and negative aspects of the designs based on the results of user testing that have been reported in the literature.  Further, we will provide design guidelines to aid tutorial attendees who will be developing new robot interfaces.  This tutorial will also include an introduction to methods for evaluating HRI designs.   The case studies in assistive robotics will include robotic wheelchairs and robotic arms.  The emergency response case studies will be taken from two domains, hazardous materials (HAZMAT) and urban search and rescue (USAR).  These case studies are particularly interesting because they encompass different quadrants of the collaborative time-space taxonomy (Ellis et al., 1991).  Assistive technologies most often involve people being collocated with robots, and therefore require robot designers to be especially mindful of the safety of the humans in close proximity to the robots.  In contrast, urban search and rescue robots are operated remotely, which means that robot designers need to provide technology-based support for humans' awareness of the robot's activities and surroundings.  The case studies include results from investigating more than a dozen systems over several years, including the use of multi-user, multi-touch tables for controlling robots.  The tutorial will examine the design of robot systems that are currently being used as well as those being developed in laboratories.   We will conduct the tutorial using a combination of lectures, discussion, and movie clips illustrating human-robot interaction.  Attendees will leave the tutorial with a set of references they can use to further investigate HRI as well as ideas for how they can apply their collaboration knowledge to the HRI domain.

For more information, please visit http://cisedu.us/cis/cts/10/main/storageDocs.jsp?doc=/docs/cts/10/tutorials/tutorials.html.