Background
Human Robot Interface (HRI) is the key component of tele-robotics systems. It is concerned with building devices and systems to enable human operators to control and to co-operate with robots. From its beginning in the 40’s (known by that time as tele-operation) till now, the main focus of tele-robotics has been on building advanced bilateral controllers through innovative input/output devices and semi or full autonomous slave systems, etc.. Historically, this was motivated by the need of operational systems to face real situations, for targeted applications, that could not be handled otherwise. Namely, tele-robotics mainly addressed nuclear, space and submarine field operations. Therefore, the main and the first concern in designing these systems was to produce technologies to allow and enhance bilateral control: one designs sub parts of the system, evaluate them through indirect psycho-physics based measurements, correct/ameliorate the sub parts and then, iteratively, rerun the design. Human was supposed to be the centre of the design process but he/she was only involved in the design process afterward, namely during the evaluation steps. Unfortunately, the main effort was put into technological developments and human remained the unknown of the problem.
However, the emergence of new non invasive techniques and technologies offers an opportunity for developing totally new approaches to HRI, by enabling a more fundamental and direct study of human behavior through his/her brain. Actions he might generate or stimulations to which his is sensitive can be better studied. For tele-robotics systems, this could be a huge advance. Indeed, tele-robotics by definition is the science of creating sensations and achieving mediated actions from partial and distorted information leading humans to complete and to correct information flows using his brain. If this last is better known, human robots interfaces designers could take advantage of this knowledge to create real friendly robots.
List of topics
- Phycho-physics and cognition for studying the compensation of physical laws changes
- Neurosciences and Robotics: Brain machine interface
- Robotics: Adaptive interfaces
- Robotics: New technologies for interfaces - sensors and actuators
- Case studies
Potential advances for space missions
Tele-operation is one of the main components of space robotics systems. An example is future planned exploration where robots are tele-operated from earth. Addressing the fundamentals of this area by proposing new points of view may lead to new solutions and new technologies for remotely controlled systems as well as for human robots interfaces in general. Indeed, when considering the robots not only as slaves but as partners, human robot relationship seen from both psychology and physiology become crucial. The remote projection and the objectivation of the remote world will be better understood and thus, will help to design the ad-hoc interfaces.
Workshop format
The workshop will be reserved to a minimum of 8 invited speakers. Any additional proposal will be considered for a participation after a review by a technical committee of five referees. A maximum of 16 papers will be accepted. The proceedings of the workshop will be proposed as a book.
A room for 30 people and a video-projection system is needed.
About the organizer
Ryad Chellali, Senior Scientist, Research, Department: Tele Robotics and Applications, ryad.chellali@iit.it
Via Morego, 30 16163 Genova
Phone: +39 010 71781 429
Fax: +39 010 720321
Mobile: +39 331 69 18 600
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