Mines Roboticists to Co-Organize Workshop on Human-Robot Interaction in Space
It’s a common observation that robots are becoming increasingly common in human environments, from manufacturing environments and search-and-rescue operations to education and therapy. Less commonly observed is the role that interactive robots stand to play not only on earth, but in space missions as well, with interactive robots already inhabiting the international space station and promising to continue keeping humans company in future deep space missions, such as in NASA’s planned Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway.
Enabling these future space-bound robots to effectively interact with astronauts will be critical: to solve problems together with astronauts, these robots will need to effectively communicate about the capabilities, goals, intents, states, and actions of themselves and their human teammates. And while this is of course true of earth-bound robots as well, robots operating in future deep space missions will have unique challenges to contend with, as they will need to operate continuously over long periods of time, including long periods without any local human teammates (including engineers!), and, even during crewed periods, will need to simultaneously work with astronauts and time-separated ground control operators.
In order to address the unique interaction challenges that will come with these specialized contexts, a group of researchers both from universities and from NASA are coming together to host a virtual workshop on Human-Robot Interaction for Space Robotics. The workshop, organized by Mines Roboticists Tom Williams and Sayanti Roy, along with Nakul Gopalan and Matthew Gombolay of Georgia Tech, Thomas Howard of University of Rochester, Daniel Szafir of University of Colorado Boulder, and Terry Fong of NASA, will be held this November during the International Conference on Social Robotics (originally intended to be held at Mines but now moved online due to Global Pandemic).
The workshop will seek to cover the broad range of exciting topics that must be addressed to enable effective interactive robots in space contexts, including methods, design principles, and technical advances that: (1) produce highly effective and efficient user interfaces for distributed human-robot teams, (2) improve human-robot trust and human workload, (3) facilitate human understanding of autonomous robot actions, particularly under high latency or limited bandwidth, (4) facilitate limited or intermittent interaction between humans and distant robotic teammates, and (5) enable explainable artificial intelligence and robot explanation generation through natural language or virtual, augmented, and mixed reality interfaces.
To learn more about the workshop, visit sites.google.com/view/hri-sr/. Workshop paper submissions will be accepted through October 15th 2020 at cmt3.research.microsoft.com/ICSR2020/. For more information, contact the HRI-SR Workshop PC Chairs, Sayanti Roy (sayantiroy@mines.edu) and Nakul Gopalan (ngopalan3@gatech.edu).
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