Toward Assistive Action, Interaction, and Engagement for Human-Robot and Robot-Robot Teams
Speaker: Prof. Maja Mataric , USC
Date: April 8 2005
Time: 4:00PM to 5:00PM
Location: KIVA/Patil
Host: Prof. Rodney Brooks, Director CSAIL Robotics Laboratory
Contact: Theresa Tomic
Relevant URL: http://robotics.usc.edu/interaction/Toward Assistive Action, Interaction, and Engagement for Human-Robot and Robot-Robot Teams
How can we get robots into vital socially-appropriate assistive roles
in hospitals, managed-care facilities, schools, and homes? This talk
will describe work aimed at enabling robots to provide useful
assistance to people in a variety of settings, ranging from
convalescence, rehabilitation, and special education, to evacuation
and disaster response. The broad spectrum of problem domains under
consideration is unified by a common set of research challenges:
goal-driven adaptive real-time action, interaction, and engagement.
Action in dynamic human environments requires control architecture
considerations. We will briefly describe our general methodology of
using principled behavior primitives to tie perception to action in a
classification-based framework suitable for efficient reaction and
learning. Interaction, both human-robot and robot-robot, requires
situational awareness and adaptivity. We will describe our work on
coordination of multi-robot teams, focusing on a formal framework for
addressing distributed task allocation and effective on-line
algorithms for multi-robot coordination, including a methodology for
automated synthesis of provably correct distributed multi-robot
controllers. Finally, engagement is necessary for time-extended
productive human-robot interaction (HRI). We will overview our newest
work on an embodied architecture for HRI and imitation-based
engagement, aimed at goal-driven, assistive domains that require
measurable performance improvements. We will demonstrate the
methodology on validated contact-free robot-assisted rehabilitation
post-stroke and post cardiac surgery systems, and ongoing projects in
robot-assisted special education and work-place training.
SPEAKER BIO:
Maja Mataric' is an associate professor in the Computer
Science Department and Neuroscience Program at the University of
Southern California, founding director of the USC Center for Robotics
and Embedded Systems (cres.usc.edu), and co-director of the USC
Robotics Research Lab (robotics.usc.edu). She received her PhD in
Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence from MIT in 1994, her MS
in Computer Science from MIT in 1990, and her BS in Computer Science
from the University of Kansas in 1987. She is a recipient of the Okawa
Foundation Award, NSF Career Award, the MIT TR100 Innovation Award,
the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award, the USC
School of Engineering Junior Research Award, the USC Provost's Center
for Interdisciplinary Research Fellowship, and is featured in the
documentary movie "Me & Isaac Newton." She is an associate editor of
three major journals and has published extensively. Her research is
aimed at endowing robots with the ability to help people through
individual assistance (for convalescence, rehabilitation training, and
education) through multi-robot team cooperation (for habitat
monitoring and service, and emergency response); see
http://robotics.usc.edu/interaction/ for details.
See other events that are part of AI Colloquium Series 2004/2005
See other events happening in April 2005
