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Abstract Robotics researchers have been focusing on developing autonomous and human-like intelligent robots that are able to plan, navigate, manipulate objects, and interact with humans in both static and dynamic environments. These capabilities, however, are usually developed for direct interactions with people in controlled environments, and evaluated primarily in terms of human safety. Consequently, human-robot interaction (HRI) in scenarios with no intervention of technical personnel is under-explored. However, in the future, robots will be deployed in unstructured and unsupervised environments where they will be expected to work unsupervised on tasks which require direct interaction with humans and may not necessarily be collaborative. Developing such robots requires comparing the effectiveness and efficiency of similar design approaches and techniques. Yet, issues regarding the reproducibility of results, comparing different approaches between research groups, and creating challenging milestones to measure performance and development over time make this difficult. Here we discuss the international robotics competition called RoboCup as a benchmark for the progress and open challenges in AI and robotics development. The long term goal of RoboCup is developing a robot soccer team that can win against the world’s best human soccer team by 2050. We selected RoboCup because it requires robots to be able to play with and against humans in unstructured environments, such as uneven fields and natural lighting conditions, and it challenges the known accepted dynamics in HRI. Considering the current state of robotics technology, RoboCup’s goal opens up several open research questions to be addressed by roboticists. In this paper, we (a) summarise the current challenges in robotics by using RoboCup development as an evaluation metric, (b) discuss the state-of-the-art approaches to these challenges and how they currently apply to RoboCup, and (c) present a path for future development in the given areas to meet RoboCup’s goal of having robots play soccer against and with humans by 2050.
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Grounding Robot Navigation in Self-Defense Law
Robots operating in close proximity to humans rely heavily on human trust to successfully complete their tasks. But what are the real outcomes when this trust is violated? Self-defense law provides a framework for analyzing tangible failure scenarios that can inform the design of robots and their algorithms. Studying self-defense is particularly important for ground robots since they operate within public environments, where they can pose a legitimate threat to the safety of nearby humans. Moreover, even if ground robots can guarantee human safety, the perception of a physical threat is sufficient to justify human self-defense against robots. In this paper, we synthesize works in law, engineering, and social science to present four actionable recommendations for how the robotics community can craft robots to mitigate the likelihood of self-defense situations arising. We establish how current U.S. self-defense law can justify a human protecting themselves against a robot, discuss the current literature on human attitudes toward robots, and analyze methods that have been produced to allow robots to operate close to humans. Finally, we present hypothetical scenarios that underscore how current robot navigation methods can fail to sufficiently consider self-defense concerns and the need for the recommendations to guide improvements in the field.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1943900
- PAR ID:
- 10516365
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication
- ISSN:
- 1944-9437
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-3670-2
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 2470 to 2477
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Busan, Korea, Republic of
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/RO-MAN57019.2023.10309428
