Event
ONLINE CS Department Seminar: Implicit Traffic Signals: A Systems Approach to Human-Robot Navigation
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
11:00 a.m.
Online via Zoom
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu
CS Department Seminar
Implicit Traffic Signals: A Systems Approach to Human-Robot Navigation
https://umd.zoom.us/j/572139075
Ross A. Knepper
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
Cornell University
Abstract
Robots are complex hardware/software systems. What is often neglected when building robot systems is that humans are part of the system, too. If we are to have robots that operate as peers alongside people, then robots need a new mix of functional and social skills. Human cooperation is facilitated by interfaces that support compositional reasoning and allow people to perform sophisticated tasks together extemporaneously. Performing human-robot joint computation requires assorted mutual information that people routinely deploy for ordinary collaborative tasks. Collaboration with people also requires robots to solve consensus, synchronization, and resource management the way people do. Much of this collaboration often happens implicitly.
I illustrate how these concepts interact in the application of social navigation, which I argue is a first-class example of teamwork. In this setting, human and robot participants avoid collision by legibly conveying intended passing sides via nonverbal cues like path shape. A topological representation using the braid group enables the robot to reason about a small enumerable set of passing outcomes. I show how implicit communication of topological group plans achieves rapid convergence to a team consensus, and how a robot in the team can deliberately influence the ultimate outcome to maximize joint performance, yielding human comfort with the robot.
Biography
Ross A. Knepper is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, where he directs the Robotic Personal Assistants Lab. His research focuses on the theory and algorithms of human-robot interaction in collaborative work. He builds systems to perform complex tasks where partnering a human and robot together is advantageous for both, such as factory assembly or home chores. Knepper has built robot systems that can assemble Ikea furniture, ask for help when something goes wrong, interpret informal speech and gesture commands, and navigate in a socially-competent manner among people. Before Cornell, Knepper was a Research Scientist at MIT. He received his Ph.D. in Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011.
