Users play an integral role in the performance of many robotic systems, and robotic systems must account for differences in users to improve collaborative performance. Much of the work in adapting to users has focused on designing teleoperation controllers that adjust to extrinsic user indicators such as force, or intent, but do not adjust to intrinsic user qualities. In contrast, the Human-Robot Interaction community has extensively studied intrinsic user qualities, but results may not rapidly be fed back into autonomy design. Here we provide foundational evidence for a new strategy that augments current shared control, and provide a mechanism to directly feed back results from the HRI community into autonomy design. Our evidence is based on a study examining the impact of the user quality “locus of control” on telepresence robot performance. Our results support our hypothesis that key user qualities can be inferred from human-robot interactions (such as through path deviation or time to completion) and that switching or adaptive autonomies might improve shared control performance.
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A Shared Autonomy Approach for Wheelchair Navigation based on Learned User Preferences.
Research on robotic wheelchairs covers a broad range from complete autonomy to shared autonomy to manual navigation by a joystick or other means. Shared autonomy is valuable because it allows the user and the robot to complement each other, to correct each other's mistakes and to avoid collisions. In this paper, we present an approach that can learn to replicate path selection according to the wheelchair user's individual, often subjective, criteria in order to reduce the number of times the user has to intervene during automatic navigation. This is achieved by learning to rank paths using a support vector machine trained on selections made by the user in a simulator. If the classifier's confidence in the top ranked path is high, it is executed without requesting confirmation from the user. Otherwise, the choice is deferred to the user. Simulations and laboratory experiments using two path generation strategies demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1637761
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10041311
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Fifth International Workshop on Assistive Computer Vision and Robotics
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- The DOI is not currently available.
